E an; 

EUROPE 



ERT SLATER 








Pass "USZ? 
Book -^SS 



PEACE AND WAR 
IN EUROPE 



BY 



GILBERT SLATER M.A. D.Sc. 

PRINCIPAL OF RUSKIN COLLEGE, OXFORD 

AUTHOR OF 
"the MAKING OF MODERN ENGLAND," ETC, 




NEW YORK 

EPDUTTON & COMPANy 

PUBLISHERS 

LI-? 15 J 






[Printed in Gnat Britain'] 



PREFACE 

This publication is based upon a course of six 
lectures given in Manchester College, Oxford, in 
October, 1914. The first four of these lectures, on 
** The Causes of European Wars," are here reproduced 
with some modification. The fifth was on " Our 
Duty during the War," and is here omitted as too 
ephemeral in its interest. What was the sixth, on 
" The Terms of Peace," is considerably altered, 
chiefly in consequence of the intervention of Turkey ; 
and the last lecture here given, and the addendum, 
on an International Court of Honour, are new 
matter. 

G. S. 

RusKiN College, Oxford. 
March, 1915. 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 

Preface ...... v 

LECTURE I 

THE ECONOMIC CAUSES OF WAR - - - I 

LECTURE II 

RELIGION AND WAR - - - - - 22 

LECTURE III 

NATIONALISM AND IMPERIALISM - - - 48 

LECTURE IV 

ARMAMENTS - - - - - " 7° 

LECTURE V 

THE TERMS OF PEACE - - - - 81 

LECTURE VI 

THE FUTURE MAINTENANCE OF PEACE - - lOI 

ADDENDUM 

THE NEED FOR AN INTERNATIONAL COURT OF 

HONOUR - - - - - 118 



PEACE AND WAR IN EUROPE 

LECTURE I 

THE ECONOMIC CAUSES OF WAR 

For a considerable time I have entertained the plan 
of offering a series of lectures upon what I may term 
the natural history of peace and war. For some 
years we have all felt that Europe was living upon 
a thin crust covering volcanic and eruptive fires. 
It was a condition which could not be properly 
described as peace any more than as war, that con- 
dition of armed peace, of fierce international rivalries 
and mutual dread. In these circumstances it seemed 
to me that there was great need of an attempt to 
study the problem in as scientific a spirit as possible, 
and yet that all the existing books on the subject were 
inadequate, for two different sets of reasons. On 
the one hand, they were all written in a more or 
less propagandist spirit, either from a definitely 
pacifist standpoint, or to prove a case for war as a 
permanent factor in human life. On the other hand, 
they were also, it seemed to me, all vitiated either 
by laying undue prominence upon the economic 
factor in the forces making for war, or by ignoring 
the economic factor altogether. Therefore, though 



2 PEACE AND WAR IN EUROPE 

fully conscious of the inadequacy of my own powers 
to deal effectively with so difficult and so terribly 
important a subject, I felt that it was worth while 
to make my own attempt, and that it might possibly 
serve as a basis for discussion. This was my attitude 
of mind in the spring and early summer of 1914, and 
I had arranged to give a course of lectures on these 
lines in Oxford early in 1915. At that time I was of 
opinion that the danger of a great European War 
involving our own country, which had seemed so 
imminent in igio, 1911, and in 1912, was already 
beginning to disappear. I thought that, owing to 
the wonderful economic revolution that has been 
going on in Russia during the past six or seven 
years, it had already become quite too foolish a 
policy for Germany or the Triple AlUance to engage 
in aggressive war against even the Dual Alliance of 
France and Russia, and that therefore the power of 
deciding whether Europe should have peace or war 
had passed into the hands of the relatively pacific 
States — France, Russia, and the United Kingdom. 
I do not think I was much mistaken in my inter- 
pretation of the economic situation ; but in estimating 
the effect of the economic situation upon the minds 
of those who control the policy of Germany, I was 
altogether mistaken, and those volcanic forces, 
rumbles of which we had felt under our feet, have 
now burst forth. The outbreak of war has com- 
pletely changed the mental attitude of all of us. We 
are set furiously to think. We cannot, perhaps, 
attain the same scientific calm, but, instead, our 



THE ECONOMIC CAUSES OF WAR 3 

thinking has become more rapid and vivid, and the 
need of getting some result of our thinking has 
become imperatively urgent. 

Fundamentally, therefore, the two questions that 
are pressing upon me, as upon all of you, are, 
What is our duty during the war ? What is our 
duty in the making of peace ? In the simplest 
language, I may say that our duty during the war 
is to make war victoriously ; our duty in the making 
of peace, to make peace permanently. This, however, 
only provokes the further question, How can we 
make war victoriously ? How can we make peace 
permanently ? The first of these questions is essen- 
tially one for the naval and military chiefs, and for 
the financial and diplomatic heads of the State. 
The second one is emphatically a question for the 
historian and the sociologist, and to deal with it 
demands that preliminary scientific study of the 
forces for war and peace which I have desired to 
take part in. 

The forces that work for war or for peace between 
nations seem to me to be capable of being classified 
under four different heads. Firstly, there are the 
biological forces which generated wars in early times, 
and which, to a certain extent, underlie war in the 
present day ; and the somewhat cognate economic 
forces which are brilliantly but not adequately dis- 
cussed by Mr. Norman Angell in *' The Great 
Illusion." Secondly, there are forces arising out of 
conflicts of religions, and out of the inculcation of 
militarist and warlike ideals in the name of religion. 



4 PEACE AND WAR IN EUROPE 

The third great root of war is the clash of the ideals 
of nationality or empire entertained by peoples and 
their governments. The fourth root of war is to be 
found in the sociological principle that a social 
necessity tends to create a social organization, and 
that every social organization acquires a sort of 
independent life of its own, which it seeks to further, 
even at the expense of the general life. The fact 
that war actually has been throughout European 
history a present reality or a danger has created 
a whole series of social organizations in the form of 
ambassadorial services, armies, fleets, arsenals, and 
gigantic firms manufacturing munitions of war for 
the purpose of waging war successfully, and these by 
their reaction upon the States concerned have tended 
continually to create the very dangers to provide 
against which they exist. I am not prepared to 
assert that this classification is exhaustive. It is, 
however, the best that I can make at the present 

moment. 

Hunger Wars. 

In connecting the evolution of human economics 
with war and peace, the broad fact is elicited that 
economic progress is closely linked with the develop- 
ment of partial peace and of a desire for peace. 
Purely hunting societies live by an occupation closely 
analogous to war, and engage in war easily and 
almost without feeling it to be any variation on the 
normal tenour of their life. The change from a 
hunting to a pastoral life strengthens the desire for 
peace, and makes war less constant, though still very 



THE ECONOMIC CAUSES OF WAR 5 

frequent. It is when men — or perhaps I should say 
women and men — set to work to cultivate the land, 
begin to have fixed habitations, to plant trees, and to 
accumulate household treasures, that the terrors of 
war become apparent to their minds. Within the 
range of countries which have a direct bearing upon 
European history, it was in Egypt and in Babylon 
that peaceful industry and effective agriculture were 
first established, and the influence upon social ideals 
of this economic progress is illustrated by the fact 
that the ancient Egyptian idea of heaven was of a 
country of flat and fertile fields, over which the 
blessed steered their ploughs drawn by beautiful and 
splendid oxen, and gathered bounteous harvests. 
From Egypt and Babylon civilization spread over 
Asia Minor and the basin of the Mediterranean, 
through the channels of the Hittite, Minoan, and 
Etruscan civilizations, and hence permeated Europe 
to an unknown extent. 

The spread of this pacific civilization, however, 
did not prevent either internal or external wars. 
The whole Balkan Peninsula in particular has been 
continually the sport of a four-footed provoker of 
strife. Professor Geddes came to the conclusion, 
from his study of the Near Eastern problem, that 
" the goat is the devil of mythology, because he is 
the devil of economics." Thus, for example, the 
various Greek city states grew up in valleys sur- 
rounded by mountains, and attained their prosperity 
by intensive culture, and by the planting of vines 
and olive-trees. But the mountains surrounding 



6 PEACE AND WAR IN EUROPE 

each valley were given over to the goatherds, who 
were continually tempted, when opportunity came, 
to feed their goats on the cultivated lands of neigh- 
bouring communities, which were continually being 
extended higher and higher up the slopes of the 
mountains. Quarrels and fights between the herds- 
men of neighbouring valleys necessarily followed, 
spreading to the main body of inhabitants, and then, 
when these organized themselves for war, they found 
that the most effective method of carrying on war 
was to destroy the crops and cut down the valuable 
trees belonging to the enemy, and thus permanently 
to destroy the sources of his prosperity. This inter- 
relation between the goatherd on the one hand, and 
the agriculturalist on the other, is the economic root 
underlying the political history of Greece. The 
importance of this goat-influence has in recent times 
been recognized by the Bulgarian Government, 
which severely restricts the keeping of goats. 

But if the goat inspired the internal contests that 
cursed some of the fairest lands of the Mediterranean 
basin, it is the horse that symbolizes the wars of 
outer barbarism against the early centres of culture. 
Gradually during historic times, and most rapidly in 
the nineteenth century, the area of grassy steppes 
occupied by nomadic folk living upon horseflesh and 
mare's milk has contracted before the advance of the 
plough. Gibbon, who wrote before the days of 
railways, describes this area as extending from West 
to East for a longitude of no degrees, or a distance of 
5,000 miles, from the Danube to the Sea of Japan, 



THE ECONOMIC CAUSES OF WAR 7 

and from North to South for a distance, in places, 
of more than 1,000 miles, from the Wall of China to 
the latitude of the reindeer. 

To understand the significance of this area upon 
the history of Europe and Asia, it is necessary to 
realize the biological results of the change from 
a hunting to a pastoral method of life. Among 
primitive peoples who live by hunting it is customary 
for a three years' interval to elapse between the 
births of successive children ; and should a child be 
born within this interval its life is generally sacrificed 
to safeguard the prospects of health and strength of 
the elder child. Obviously at less than three years 
old the child belonging to a tribe living upon the 
flesh of wild animals, berries, grubs, and wild roots, 
cannot be satisfactorily nourished without the assist- 
ance of his mother's milk. The hardships of life 
also shorten the child-bearing period, and the birth- 
rate, thus doubly limited, is usually approximately 
equal to the necessarily somewhat high death-rate, 
and is barely sufficient to maintain the numbers of 
the population. When, however, the hunters of 
wild horses had tamed them and could add milk to 
meat, and a new and suitable nutriment became 
available both for mothers and young, a revolution 
in the conditions of vitality took place. Births in- 
creased and deaths decreased, and the Malthusian 
theory of the tendency of population to increase 
faster than the means of subsistence, which so far 
from being universal is only exceptionally true, began 
to apply to humanity. 



8 PEACE AND WAR IN EUROPE 

Throughout the pastoral horse-breeding regions 
there appears to have been going on in recent 
geological times a movement of desiccation and 
elevation of the surface of the land which has tended 
to diminish the amount of pasture available. This 
diminution has not been steady, but good seasons 
have alternated with bad. During the periods in 
which good seasons have predominated the grass has 
been abundant, the number of horses has tended to 
increase, and similarly the human beings dependent 
upon them. When dry summers and droughts have 
supervened the multiplied hordes of nomads have 
been driven forth into the cultivated lands to the 
east, south, and west, and they have gone forth 
as conquerors. 

Most interesting studies of the people of the 
Steppes have been made by sociologists of the school 
of Le Play ; but for our purpose the description given 
by Gibbon {'* Decline and Fall," chap, xxvi.) is 
sufficiently accurate and vivid. His main thesis is 
that '' the pastoral manners which have been adorned 
with the fairest attributes of peace and innocence are 
much better adapted to the fierce and cruel habits of 
a military life." He refers first to the results of 
a carnivorous diet, and while doubting whether that 
has a direct effect on character, he urges that the 
constant and open killing of domestic animals, and 
serving the bleeding limbs with but little preparation, 
must blunt the feeling of compassion. Then he 
dwells upon the military advantages of the pastoral 
life. Whereas corn has to be transported with 



THE ECONOMIC CAUSES OF WAR g 

difficulty, ** the active cavalry of Scythia is always 
followed, in their most distant and rapid incursions, 
by an adequate number of spare horses, who may be 
occasionally used either to redouble the speed or to 
satisfy the hunger of the Barbarians." Then the 
pastoral life is itself a training for war. ** The 
individuals of the same tribe are constantly assembled, 
but they are assembled in a camp. . . . The flocks 
and herds, after grazing all day in the adjacent 
pastures, retire, on the approach of night, within the 
protection of the camp. The necessity of preventing 
the most mischievous confusion in such a perpetual 
concourse of men and animals must gradually 
introduce, in the distribution, the order and the 
guard of the encampment, the rudiments of the 
military art. As soon as the forage of a certain 
district is consumed, the tribe, or, rather, army, 
of shepherds makes a regular march to some fresh 
pastures, and thus acquires the practical knowledge 
of one of the most important and difficult operations 
of war." Such migrations, he points out, are made 
all the easier by the severity of the climate, which in 
winter freezes all rivers, so that waggons and cattle 
can cross securely. He then depicts the skill of the 
men of the Steppes in horsemanship, in the use 
of the bow and the lance, their abundant leisure and 
their habit of spending that leisure in the chase. 
*'The general hunting matches, the pride and delight 
of the Tartar princes, compose an instructive exercise 
for their numerous cavalry." They surround a 
district of many square miles, and drive all the game 

2 



10 PEACE AND WAR IN EUROPE 

to one centre. ** For this march, which frequently 
continues many days, the cavalry are obliged to climb 
the hills, to swim the rivers, and to wind through 
the valleys, without interrupting the prescribed order 
of their general progress. . . . Their leaders study, 
in this practical school, the most important lesson of 
the military art: the prompt and accurate judgment 
of ground, of distance, and of time. To employ 
against a human enemy the same patience and 
valour, the same skill and discipline, is the only 
alteration which is required in real war." 

Thus there has been almost from the dawn of 

civilization incursion after incursion of pastoral 

tribes upon those countries which have attained a 

higher civilization. China and India have suffered 

conquests ; but the Mediterranean basin has suffered 

most frequently. The historic militarism of the Old 

World has been the result of this conflict. Pacific 

Egypt, whose early social institutions seem to have 

been matriarchal, and whose original Kings appear 

to have been magical symbols of the life of the 

community, was overwhelmed by those whom they 

termed "The Shepherds" {Hyksos), but succeeded 

in organizing an effective resistance, which, however, 

transformed the social and political conditions of the 

country, and created a military despotism. Babylon, 

on the other hand, succumbed to the pastoral 

Assyrians, but equally there a military despotism 

was created. Similar incursions, whether of pastorals 

from Central Asia, or of other peoples of more settled 

habits and advanced culture, driven from their old 



THE ECONOMIC CAUSES OF WAR ii 

sites by the movements of populations originating in 
the horse-breeding area, again and again overflowed 
Asia Minor, the Balkan Peninsula, and Italy. The 
Roman Empire was the first effective organization 
of Mediterranean civilization for its defence against 
outer barbarism, and its fall before the attacks of 
Goths, Alans, Vandals, Huns, Arabs, Saracens, and 
finally Turks, brought this ancient struggle to its 
most terrible climax. 

War breeds war, and the wars of more recent 
times count among their causes the unstable and 
chaotic conditions produced by conquests of more 
advanced civilizations by comparatively uncultured 
peoples. In some cases the conquered ultimately 
succeeded in conquering the conquerors; but this 
has notably not been the case where the Turks 
are concerned. Perhaps in consequence of some 
racial characteristic, perhaps merely because of the 
difference of religion, the Turks have always failed to 
acquire the civilization of their subjects, or to recon- 
cile them to their rule, or to absorb them into their 
own body, or even to dissolve their social organization. 

Hence, although Turkish dominion in Europe has 
lasted between four and five hundred years, it has 
never been accepted, and no peace is possible upon 
the basis of Turkish rule over Europeans. We have 
here one item in the long list of causes of the 
present war. 

We have to note, however, that the original spring 
of so much disaster is being fast dried up. Just as 
the Western Empire of Rome when it perished left 



12 PEACE AND WAR IN EUROPE 

in London a distant outlying station that remained 
unconquered by the barbarians, from which grew 
what we call the British Empire, but what might 
more properly be called the London Empire, or the 
neo-Roman Empire, so also before Constantinople 
perished Byzantine culture had found an outlying 
centre in the highway of commerce between the 
Black Sea and the Baltic at Kieff, on the River 
Dnieper. This trading centre became also a centre 
of industrial civilization, from which spread that 
most fundamental of the arts of civilization — tillage 
and the growing of corn. Kieff succumbed to the 
attacks of the pastoral nomads, but other cities, and 
notably Moscow, sprang up to take its place. When 
Constantinople fell before the Turks the niece of the 
last Greek Emperor of Constantinople became the 
wife of the Prince of Moscow. From Moscow as 
a centre Russian grain-growers spread, sending before 
them a protecting cloud of Cossack cavalry, but 
really conquering the land with the plough. In 
consequence of the Russian advance into the Black 
Earth district, which was Tartary, and is now South 
Russia, and their later advance into Siberia and 
Turkestan, introducing tillage and fixed habitations, 
the great scourge of the ancient civilizations, the 
periodic incursions of pastoral conquerors, has been 
eliminated from possibility. There are no more 
Zenghis Khans or Tamerlanes. The reservoir of 
Mongols and Tartars no longer overflows. 

The wars of this type, which I have called hunger 
wars — wars caused by the pressure of increasing 



THE ECONOMIC CAUSES OF WAR 13 

population upon pastoral peoples incapable of in- 
creasing their means of subsistence, but all too 
capable of conquest — may truly be described as 
springing from biological necessity. But at the 
present time it cannot be asserted truly that there 
is any biological necessity for war. German socio- 
logists have endeavoured to make such a plea for an 
expansionist policy for their own country at the risk 
of war and by means of war. They have urged that 
the increase of population in Germany and the 
limitations of her territories create a biological 
necessity for expansion. It is obvious that the plea 
fails, if merely because the world lies open to the 
German who finds it too difficult to make a living 
in his native country. It is curious, indeed, that we 
heard little of this biological necessity for expansion 
when German emigrants were leaving their country 
in great numbers, and it only appears to have been 
thought of since the development of German indus- 
tries has enabled the increasing population to be 
absorbed, and emigration has declined to a very low 
level. The necessity, in fact, is not biological, but 
sentimental. The rulers of Germany prefer an 
expansion in population within rather than without 
the sphere of their authority. The sentiment is 
natural, but to dignify it with the term " biological 
necessity" is to say the thing which is not ; and to 
regard this false necessity as a justification for letting 
war loose upon the world is a sophism on a par with 
the pretexts which tyrants in all ages have found for 
their most monstrous deeds. 



14 PEACE AND WAR IN EUROPE 

Trade Wars. 

In the history of Europe the desire not merely for 
the food necessary for existence, but for special 
economic advantages making possible the acquisition 
of wealth, has underlain numerous wars. In the 
Middle Ages the most important form of international 
trade was that in spices, which were collected in the 
East Indian Islands and in Ceylon, brought by 
Malay traders to the ports of India, there passed 
into the hands of Arab merchants, and carried by 
them to the markets of Baghdad, Damascus, and 
Alexandria. The profits of this trade enriched 
Constantinople, the cities of Italy, and the valley of 
the Rhine. Spices were even brought overland to 
Nijni Novgorod, and thence to the Baltic. Venice 
and Genoa struggled for maritime supremacy in the 
Mediterranean in order to reap the profits of this trade. 
Behind the Crusades, in addition to the religious 
motive, there was a distinct trade interest, and, during 
the period in which the Christian kingdom of Jeru- 
salem was in existence, Jerusalem became a mart 
for the produce of India. When one trade route 
between India and Europe after another was closed 
by the spread of Turkish dominion, it was to capture 
the trade in spices that Prince Henry the Navigator 
began the exploration of the coast of Africa, and 
Vasco da Gama made his wonderful voyage round 
the Cape of Good Hope to the Coromandel coast. 
The same object sent Christopher Columbus across 
the Atlantic, and many a brave English seaman to 



THE ECONOMIC CAUSES OF WAR 15 

his fate in the vain search for a practicable north- 
eastern or north-western route to India. With these 
explorations and the consequent discoveries, com- 
merce passed from the Pelagic into the Oceanic 
stage, and the rivalries of Genoa and Venice were 
repeated on a grander scale, as Portugal, Spain, 
Holland, England, and France successively entered 
into the conflict for maritime supremacy, commercial 
opportunities, and, incidentally, for colonial empire. 

This series of wars appeared to be closed with the 
peace after Waterloo. Britain then emerged trium- 
phant against all rivals, and not long after she had 
acquired and consolidated her Empire, she disarmed 
the jealousy of possible rivals by instituting her 
system of self-government for her colonies inhabited 
by people of European stock, by accepting for the 
whole Empire the principle that government must 
be for the benefit of the governed, and for these 
islands and for India the principle of free trade in 
her commercial dealings with foreign countries. And 
then she summoned the world to inaugurate the new 
period of international co-operation in industry, and 
friendly rivalry in the arts of peace, by opening the 
first international exhibition. 

The hopes, however, of a world peace which 
appeared so bright when the first international 
exhibition was opened in London in the year 1851, 
was clouded, first by the series of European Wars 
beginning in 1854 and lasting till 1871, which marked 
the creation of the new kingdom of Italy and the 
new Empire of Germany, and later by the appear- 



i6 PEACE AND WAR IN EUROPE 

ance of a fresh economic motive for national rivalry 
and conflict. In the year 185 1 railways only existed 
in the British Isles, in some of the longest settled 
districts of North America, and in some of the most 
advanced countries of Europe. Since then the 
world has steadily been railroadized. The Americans 
say that he who owns the transportation system of 
the country owns the country, and the maxim is full 
of significance and truth. When a country that is 
backward, but rich in natural resources, is " opened 
up," all sorts of opportunities for exploitation are 
presented to the financiers who can control the 
investment of other people's capital and the use of 
other people's knowledge. Hence the international 
scramble for " concessions," for the right to make 
railroads in China, in Turkey, in Asia Minor, in 
Persia, in Africa; the long conflict between England 
and France for political influence in Egypt ; the 
more recent conflict between France and Germany 
over Morocco. 

The influence of this principle upon international 
relationships has been very ably presented by Mr. 
Brailsford in his ** The War of Steel and Gold," 
published not long before the outbreak of hostilities. 
He did not think then that the conflict of interests 
of the financiers of Berlin and Paris, or Berlin and 
London, would lead to actual warfare, though he 
regarded it as the chief cause of the continually 
growing expenditure upon armaments. I think he 
was fundamentally right, and I am not prepared to 
assert that any motive of this sort would have been 



THE ECONOMIC CAUSES OF WAR 17 

sufficient by itself to have provoked the present 
conflict. Nevertheless, such a motive was un- 
doubtedly one important factor in the situation. 

We cannot understand the origin of the present 
war without recalling the history of Germany's efforts 
at obtaining rich tracts of undeveloped country for 
exploitation. She turned her eyes first to South 
America, the quarter of the globe richest in un- 
developed resources. There she was barred by the 
Monroe Doctrine from doing anything more than 
settle organized groups of her citizens on countries 
that remained predominantly of Latin language 
and civilization. She aspired to a share of Africa, 
and though Lord Salisbury and the British Govern- 
ment put no obstacle in the way of the acquisition 
of the immense areas of German West Africa, 
German East Africa, Togoland, and the Cameroons, 
yet all these colonies proved somewhat disappointing. 
The beginning of something that might have de- 
veloped into a German Eastern Empire, comparable 
with the English Empire in India, was made by 
the extorted lease from China of Kiaochau ; but its 
development was hindered by the jealousy of other 
States, the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, and by the un- 
expected renaissance of China. There remained the 
last and the most hopeful project, that of ** pacific 
interpenetration " of the Turkish Empire by means 
of the " Baghdad Railway." 

In this sphere German diplomacy won great 
triumphs. Great Britain, France, and Russia ac- 
quiesced in the passing into German hands of all 

3 



i8 PEACE AND WAR IN EUROPE 

of the existing railways in Asiatic Turkey, and the 
control of the projected railways. To Germany 
hereby was ceded the future tutelage of Asia Minor, 
Mesopotamia, and Syria, the seats of some of the 
most ancient civilizations, including great districts 
now desolate, which in past times have supported 
vast and prosperous populations. All these were 
being linked up with the railway-lines from Berlin, 
through Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, to Constan- 
tinople. Further, the Bosphorus being linked with 
Baghdad and the Persian Gulf, a new and shorter 
highway to India was on the point of being opened, 
and this was to be in German hands. Our Foreign 
Office had shown that it did not exactly welcome this 
development, but it had withdrawn all opposition. 

Germans have long envied England the profits, 
which they perhaps exaggerate, derived by Britain 
from her rule in India, and they doubtless also are 
of opinion that those profits are insignificant com- 
pared with those which might be obtained if the 
natural resources of India were developed scientific- 
ally in a German manner. They probably, for 
instance, and with some reason, regard us as block- 
heads and ignoramuses for allowing one of the world's 
richest stores of energy, the streams that flow from 
the Himalayas, to run to waste. But whether or 
not a vision of German India was seen as the final 
terminus of the Baghdad Railway, that railway itself 
was sufiiciently important as a stepping-stone to a 
Teutonized Mesopotamia and Babylonia, likely to 
become as wealthy as in the days of Nebuchadnezzar. 



THE ECONOMIC CAUSES OF WAR 19 

The strength of the chain is the strength of its 
weakest link, and the weak hnk of this railway-chain 
was where it traversed the country of the Southern 
Slavs. Hence it has been a cardinal object of 
German policy, all the more since the Baghdad 
project was embarked upon, that Serbia as well as 
Turkey should be the vassal of Austria as com- 
pletely as Austria is the vassal of Germany. The 
two Balkan wars created an enlarged and victorious 
Serbia, strong in its alliance with the Russian 
Empire and driven into hostility to Austria by the 
existence of a Serbia Irredenta, twice as large and 
twice as populous as the little independent kingdom, 
and seething with discontent against Austrian and 
Magyar domination. It was therefore fully as much 
an element in the policy of Berlin as of Budapest or 
Vienna that Serbia should be crushed. The ulti- 
matum to Serbia after the assassination of the Arch- 
duke Ferdinand was sent in the name of the Emperor 
Francis Joseph; but the sending of it was sanctioned, 
if not decreed, in Berlin, to prevent the growing 
hopes of a great German Empire in the Near East 
from being dashed to the ground. 

We have, therefore, to recognize the continued 
existence in the world to-day of economic forces 
tending to produce war, and the importance of this 
element among the causes of the present war. On 
the other hand, the still greater strength of the 
economic forces working for peace must not be 
ignored. The industrial and commercial activities 
of man surmount all the obstacles interposed by 



20 PEACE AND WAR IN EUROPE 

political boundaries, and link all nations together in 
profitable co-operation. Absorption in economic 
interests produces a type of character which is 
unfavourable to militarism. 

Economic Evolution and Peace. 

It is obvious that the individuals whose economic 
interests are favoured by war are insignificant in 
number compared with those whose well-being de- 
pends on peace. The more widely property is 
diffused in any country, the clearer is the conscious- 
ness among the people of the desirability of peace ; 
the more widely diffused political power, the stronger 
the political force in favour of a pacific policy. Un- 
fortunately a pacific policy when pursued by some, 
but not by all nations, is no security for peace. It 
is a hoary lie that it takes two to make a quarrel. 
Either party can force a quarrel. A pacific policy 
on both sides is necessary in order that peace may 
be maintained. 

With regard to our own country, I think it is 
pretty clear that offensive war against a formidable 
adversary had already become politically impossible 
before the end of the nineteenth century for purely 
economic reasons. The manufacturers, traders, 
retailers, small property owners, comparatively pros- 
perous working men, trade unionists, co-operators, 
had become so conscious that war meant for them 
economic dangers and disasters, and their combined 
political power was so great, that the only wars that 
continued to be possible were those like the South 



THE ECONOMIC CAUSES OF WAR 21 

African War, generally expected to be an easy and 
trifling enterprise, or a war like the present one, 
imposed on us by the determination of the enemy. 

The economic aspect of war has, on the whole, 
been admirably treated by Mr. Norman Angell, 
though on some questions, as in his dealing with 
the possibility of deriving a national profit from the 
receipt of a war indemnity, he slips into fallacies ; 
but the prospect suggested to readers of '* Europe's 
Great Illusion," that European wars would cease to 
be possible when nations realized the economic facts 
concerning war, were misleading. His great mistake 
lay in dwelling too exclusively upon the economic 
factor in political life, and, in particular, in over- 
estimating the power of the economic motive in 
determining the policy of Germany. Had his con- 
ception of the Modern State, as something that 
existed in the interests of private property owners, 
been as applicable to Germany as to England, France, 
and America, the hope which he excited of the end of 
great wars by a process of economic enlightenment 
would not have been so illusory. But the State in 
Germany is something finer and something more 
dangerous than that. The teaching that has done 
so much to mould British institutions and British 
policy during the nineteenth century, the teaching 
that the business of the State is to conserve individual 
life and property (and property rather than life), and 
the business of the individual is to buy in the cheapest 
and sell in the dearest market, has never been accepted 
there. 



LECTURE II 
RELIGION AND WAR 

Wars of Religion. 
We are frequently told that wars of religion are 
things of the past. This is only true if the words 
"wars of religion" are understood in a narrow 
sense. The sense in which I propose to use the 
word religion includes any ethical beliefs or ideals 
adopted by considerable populations, or inculcated 
among them, in such a way as to influence their 
thoughts, emotions, and conduct. Using the word 
in this sense, the religious influences making for war 
or for peace are obviously supremely important to- 
day and demand careful analysis. 

Quite apart from any definite religious teaching of a 
militarist or pacifist character, the influence of religious 
differences has been very great both in creating wars 
and in intensifying the bitterness of wars springing 
from other causes. In early days it was the complacent 
habit of tribal deities to take part energetically in 
all tribal wars on the side of their worshippers, and 
in consequence the greatest cruelties were regarded 
as religious duties when perpetrated upon the enemy 
who worshipped other gods. At the present time 
a great part of the world has outgrown tribalism 



RELIGION AND WAR 23 

in religion, and we feel it somewhat of a shock to 
realize that the Kaiser believes in and worships a 
Deity whose special care it is to foster the Hohen- 
zollern Empire and hallow all that is done for its 
aggrandizement, however atrocious in our eyes. 

The development of world religions of a propa- 
gandist character, however, widened the scope of 
wars as much as it tended to diminish the frequency 
of war between neighbouring tribes of the same 
religion ; and sectarian differences again, even among 
Christians, have made their own wars of religion, the 
results of which still remain. Thus those Party 
divisions in our own country which recently so 
nearly brought us to irremediable disaster, spring 
from the Civil War — essentially religious — of the 
seventeenth century between Cavaliers and Puritans, 
the disastrous and degrading effect of which historians 
are much too apt to slur over. The preaching of 
Protestantism in Northern Europe produced the 
wars of the Huguenots in France, the wars of the 
foundation of the Dutch Republic in the Nether- 
lands, and, most important of all, the Thirty Years' 
War which ravaged Germany between 16 18 and 
1648. In this last it is calculated that two-thirds 
of the population was destroyed ; those that remained 
were reduced from an extraordinarily high level of 
civilization and prosperity to utter misery, while 
internal feuds and divisions made the German 
people the sport of alien monarchs, like the King 
of Sweden and the King of France. It was only 
natural that in later years, when Germany began 



24 PEACE AND WAR IN EUROPE 

to revive and Germans studied their own history, 
that unity at all costs became the aspiration of every 
patriotic German ; and the realization of the terrible 
results of disunion is the root from which spring the 
moral power of Prussia, and the ready submission of 
the rest of the Empire to her arrogant and irritating 
hegemony. This national determination to maintain 
unity at all costs is a stubborn fact which our 
national policy will have to take into account. 

Another still longer and still more bitter series of 
conflicts of hostile creeds is that between Moham- 
medanism and Christianity. The war of the Cross 
against the Crescent began as soon as Mahomet's 
Arab converts attacked the Eastern Empire ; it 
continued while Mohammedan conquest spread 
through Africa and Spain to the Pyrennes, through 
the episode of the Crusades, and the Turkish advance 
to Vienna. This war has never ceased in the Balkan 
Peninsula. You might think me fanciful if I de- 
scribed our Soudan war, the French wars in Algiers, 
Tunis, Morocco, and the Soudan, and the Italian war 
in Tripoli as new crusades ; yet I do contend that the 
most important cause underlying them is an inevit- 
able conflict between Western civilization (whether it 
is or is not rightly termed Christian) and the Ethics of 
the Desert embodied in Mohammedanism. Be this 
as it may, all must admit that the existence of a con- 
tinuous condition of open or disguised war between 
Christian and Mohammedan in South-East Europe, 
Asia Minor, and Syria, has acted as a continual irri- 
tant to the relations between the Great European 



RELIGION AND WAR 25 

Powers, though for them a war over difference of 
creed would no longer be possible. 

Religious Teaching on War. 

Far more important, however, than either the in- 
direct result of past religious wars or the present 
situation, or the association of religious feeling with 
national sentiment, has been the influence of definite 
teaching of pacific and warlike ethics. The later 
period of the Roman Empire saw the clash of four 
religions, each of which was marked by a fairly 
definite attitude towards war. The Empire was 
assaulted on the east by Mohammedanism, which 
regarded war as virtuous when it was waged on 
behalf of the faith, and held out to the warrior the 
prospect of a heaven of ease and sensuous pleasure. 
Over the frontiers of the Roman Empire there 
spread a form of Zoroastrian religion known as 
Mithraism, which taught that the universe is the 
scene of conflict between almost equal powers of 
good and evil. This was a religion that appealed 
specially to the soldier fighting in defence of civiliza- 
tion, but it gradually disappeared, partly superseded 
by, and partly absorbed into, Christianity. 

The Roman Empire and civilization on the 
northern frontier were assaulted by the devotees 
of a religion more intensively mihtary than either 
Mithraism or Mohammedanism. Both of these 
preached war for an ultimate end. Odinism preached 
war for its own sake. The heaven which it offered 
as a reward of virtue, the one virtue which it recog- 

4 



26 PEACE AND WAR IN EUROPE 

nized being to die on the field of battle, was Valhalla. 
In Valhalla, the heroes feast every night on the flesh 
of the heavenly boar, and drink till unconscious the 
mead that flows from the udders of the heavenly 
goat ; in the morning they rise from their slumbers 
divided into armies, and fight until they are all 
hacked to pieces. Then, when the evening falls, 
their dismembered bodies join themselves together 
again, and their wounds are healed ready for another 
night of feasting, to be followed by another day of 
battle. 

The theory is held by some historians, and I am 
inclined to think with great probability, though it 
became unfashionable when the school of Max Miiller 
was in the ascendant, that the Odinist religion was 
the creation of an actual founder, just as much as 
Mohammedanism was the creation of Mahomet, and 
that it was invented and propagated in order to fill 
its barbarian adherents with the lust for battle. Be 
this as it may, the history of Northern Europe for 
hundreds of years is the story of a conflict waged 
equally in the field of battle and in the souls of men 
between Christianity and Odinism. The heathens 
overwhelmed the Christian regions and destroyed the 
western Empire, but the Christian missionaries 
penetrated to the remotest North and brought the 
conquerors of the Empire under the sway of the 
Church. One little incident in the most distant area 
of this conflict will perhaps illustrate its character 
better than any attempt at description. The 
Icelandic " Njala Saga " turns upon the death of 



RELIGION AND WAR 27 

one of the first converts to Christianity in Iceland, 
Njal, known afterwards as Burnt Njal. Njal and his 
household had become involved in a feud with a 
neighbouring clan. One night when most of his 
men were away he was surrounded in his farmhouse 
by his enemies, who prepared to set the whole place 
on fire. Out of their great respect for Njal they 
offered him a free passage. He, however, found 
himself in a dilemma between conflicting duties. If 
he survived,. his traditional code of ethics compelled 
him to prosecute the feud. His newly acquired 
Christian ethics taught him to forgive his enemies 
and to return good for evil. He solved the difficulty 
by refusing the offer of life ; and refraining also 
from any blow in his own defence, he lay down on 
his bed beside his wife, who had refused to leave 
him. They drew the coverlet over their faces, and 
the story goes that when their friends sought for 
them afterwards amid the heap of ashes which 
represented the house, their bodies and faces were 
found untouched by the fire, dead, but calm and 
peaceful, and after they had been buried beneath a 
great mound, strange and solemn music was heard 
to proceed from it. 

Much of the deepest interest of the history of the 
Middle Ages turns upon the continued conflict 
between Christian and Odinist ethics after 
Christianity had been nominally accepted. The 
Church had to accept warfare both public and 
private as a dominant fact. It had to compromise 
with Odinism and endeavour to control forces which 



28 PEACE AND WAR IN EUROPE 

were too strong for it to overcome. Thus it enlisted 
the military ardour of professedly Christian knights, 
who had but little of the spirit of St. Francis, in the 
Crusades. It invented the Peace of God and the 
Truce of God. By the former, certain classes were 
protected from violence and slaughter — for example, 
women and labouring peasants — a victory for 
humanity which we thought till a few weeks ago had 
been permanently won throughout Christendom. 
By the latter, private warfare was prohibited during 
Sundays and other Holy Days, and the number of 
prohibited days gradually increased till there were 
only about sixty left in the year during which a 
baron without mortal sin could take up arms against 
his neighbour. The Truce of God was superseded 
by the growing power of royal governors, who substi- 
tuted the King's Peace, prohibiting private warfare 
altogether. 

But perhaps the greatest achievement of the 
Church in the direction of compromise was the 
development of the conception of chivalry, and 
the ideal of the " perfect, gentle knight without fear 
and without reproach " — a conception that is, per- 
haps, the greatest inheritance that has been handed 
down to us from the Middle Ages. 

I have dwelt so long upon this ancient struggle 
between Odinism and Christianity because it is 
obvious that to Englishmen and Frenchmen, at any 
rate, the present war does appear as a revived con- 
flict between Odinism on the one hand, and the 
sentiments and ethical ideals of chivalry and 



RELIGION AND WAR 29 

humanity on the other. Germany is peculiarly 
associated with the worship of Odin. The great 
Odinist epic, the " Nibelungen Lied," has for its 
scene the Valley of the Rhine, and for its topic the 
contest for the fatal possession of the Nibelung hoard, 
evidently an accumulation of treasure from the 
sacked cities of the Empire. Germany was late in 
accepting Roman Christianity, and afterwards took 
the lead in throwing off the spiritual dominion of 
Rome, substituting another form of Christianity 
in Lutheranism, which eliminated the worship of 
the Virgin Mother and Infant Jesus ; and even 
Lutheranism appears to be now practically dead. 
I am at any rate assured by my friend Herr Sassen- 
bach, of the General Kommission of the German 
Social Democratic Trade Unions, that while Roman 
Catholicism continues to exercise some spiritual 
influence, Lutheranism has — or, at least, had up 
to the outbreak of war — none at all; and I am 
further informed that though expensive new Lutheran 
churches are continually being built, the money for 
their erection comes from the contributions of Jews 
who desire to conciliate the Government by subsidiz- 
ing the Government religion. Certainly it appears 
that from the time of the Thirty Years' War to the 
present day there has been no effective religious 
movement conflicting with the dominant militarism 
of Northern Germany, and that no Christian teach- 
ing has ever eliminated from Germany the influence 
of its ancient pagan Odinism. Would it even be an 
exaggeration to say that Christianity is an exotic in 



30 PEACE AND WAR IN EUROPE 

Germany which never really took root ? and that 
Prussia, in particular, has ever been faithful to the 
God of War ? 

Here it is well to note certain historical reasons 
why the cult of War has been so powerful in Prussia. 
The present kingdom of Prussia was originally the 
electorate of Brandenburg, and the Electors of 
Brandenburg had originally been Markgraves — ix., 
Counts of the Marches. The Mark of Brandenburg 
was originally granted to a certain warrior known as 
Albert the Bear. He was posted in the bend of the 
Elbe, in the region which is still called the Old Mark 
of Brandenburg. He had to hold this outpost of the 
Holy Roman Empire in the centre of its most 
vulnerable frontier, midway between the mountains 
of Bohemia and the Baltic Sea, and directly in the 
path of the still more or less nomadic peoples of the 
great plain of the north and east of Europe. By 
conquest he extended his dominions from the Elbe 
to the Oder — this district forming the Middle Mark 
of Brandenburg — and east of the Oder over the 
New Mark. In the course of some centuries the 
three Marks passed to the Hohenzollern family, 
and the Markgravate became an Electorate. Still, 
Brandenburg lay as before in the midst of a plain, 
with no natural frontier to protect it either on the 
north, or south, or east, or west. Militarism was 
more pronounced than in any other German 
electorate, for its only defences were men. 

In the seventeenth century, on the conclusion 
of the Thirty Years' War, the great Elector estab- 



RELIGION AND WAR 31 

lished the Hohenzollern system of autocracy, a 
military organization providing for a very large army 
in proportion to the population, with specially severe 
discipline. He also secured the indivisibility of the 
electorate by establishing a law of primogeniture for 
the succession ; so that while other German states 
tended to break into fragments Brandenburg grew 
in area and strength. It acquired the detached 
region, East Prussia — a German state of an even 
more military character, established in non-German 
lands by the knights of the Teutonic Order — which 
was outside the Empire, and when the Electors 
became Kings they took the title of King of Prussia. 
Militarism became more and more a sort of State 
religion in Prussia. King Frederick William, the 
father of Frederick the Great, whose passion for 
drill and for gigantic soldiers is famous, wrote : 
" Desertion is from hell ; it is the work of the 
children of the devil. No child of God could 
possibly be guilty of it." In accordance with this 
maxim he proposed to shoot his son Frederick for 
trying to run away from his cruelty, and was 
only deterred by the intercession of neighbouring 
monarchs. 

Frederick the Great's aggressive and successful 
wars, waged with unflinching determination against 
tremendous odds, and his cynical partition of Poland, 
added Silesia, West Prussia, and Posen to his 
dominions, and made the kingdom by far the 
strongest state in northern Germany. He has 
become a sort of patron saint to Prussia, as Joan 



32 PEACE AND WAR IN EUROPE 

of Arc to the French. The Napoleonic wars, while 
temporarily humbling Prussia in the dust, prompted 
her to create her system of a short term of military 
service so widely enforced as to create a nation in 
arms. The final stages of the war also added a great 
portion of the basin of the Rhine to the Prussian 
Kingdom. Bismarck, again, played on a larger stage 
a part corresponding to that of Frederick the Great, 
and by three wars — waged in the period 1864-1871, 
each an aggressive war, each prepared for by 
diplomacy little trammelled by scruple, and each 
entirely successful — created the Empire of Germany 
under the hegemony of Prussia as we know it at the 
present day. 

Hence we see how the whole of their history has 
tended to impress upon Prussians certain ideas of 
policy and political ethics. Firstly, the supreme 
importance of high national organization, of prepara- 
tion for war, and of the devotion of the largest 
possible share of the nation's energies to military 
objects ; secondly, the profitableness of successful 
war ; thirdly, the unimportance of the public opinion 
of foreign countries ; fourthly, the advantage of 
seizing a favourable moment to attack a neighbour- 
ing State. It is not surprising, therefore, that Von 
Rumelen and the fashionable school of German 
political writers from the time of Bismarck's triumph 
began to maintain the doctrine that there is, and can 
be, no international ethic ; that there is nothing 
above the State ; that the highest duty of the indi- 
vidual is to the State, and that the State should 



RELIGION AND WAR 33 

seek nothing except its own aggrandizement. The 
general effect of the study of their own history, 
of the teaching of Nietzsche and Treitschke, and 
the practical acceptance of the discipline and 
traditional ideals of the army upon the young 
Germany of to-day, is eloquently, and with an 
extraordinary degree of sympathy, described by 
Professor Cramb ; 

" Nietzsche clears away the accumulated rubbish 
of twelve hundred years; he attempts to set the 
German imagination back where it was with Alaric 
and Theodoric, fortified by the experience of twelve 
centuries, to confront the darkness unaided, un- 
appalled, triumphant, great and free. 

"Thus while preparing to found a world-empire, 
Germany is also preparing to create a world-religion. 
No cultured European nation since the French Revo- 
lution has made any experiment in creative religion. 
The experiment which England, with her dull im- 
agination, has recoiled from, Germany will make ; 
the fated task which England has declined, she will 
essay. 

"That is the faith of Young Germany in 1913. 
The prevalent bent of mind at the universities, in 
the army amongst the more cultured, is towards 
what may be described as the religion of Valour, 
reinterpreted by Napoleon and by Nietzsche — the 
glory of action, heroism, the doing of great things. 
It is in metaphysics Zarathustra's *Amor Fati.' It 
is in politics and ethics Napoleonism. These same 
young men, who, in this very month, thrill with the 
scenes of 1813, see in Napoleon the oppressor, but 
they see in Napoleon's creed the springs of his action, 
a message of fire : Live dangerously ! 

5 



34 PEACE AND WAR IN EUROPE 

" Kant's great Imperative was born of the defeats 
and of the victories of Frederick ; echoes from KoUn 
and Kunersdorf, as well as from Rossbach, thrid 
along its majestic phrasing; it is moulded in heroic 
suffering, and brought forth in resignation and in 
grief that is overcome. But in the newer Imperative 
ring the accents of an earlier, greater prime, the 
accents heard by the Scamander, which even at 
Chaeronea did not entirely die away : 

*' * Ye have heard how in old time it was said. 
Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the 
earth ; but I say unto you. Blessed are the valiant, 
for they shall make the earth their throne. And ye 
have heard men say, Blessed are the poor in spirit ; 
but I say unto you, Blessed are the great in soul and 
the free in spirit, for they shall enter in Valhalla. 
And ye have heard men say. Blessed are the peace- 
makers; but I say unto you. Blessed are the war- 
makers, for they shall be called, if not the children 
of Jehovah, the children of Odin, who is greater 
than Jehovah. . . .' 

''This conflict between Christ and Napoleon for 
the mastery over the minds of men is the most 
significant phenomenon of the twentieth century. 
You meet with it in England and in America, as in 
Austria and Spain. You meet with it even in Italy. 
In Russia Tolstoi's furious attacks are a proof of its 
increasing sway. The new spirit in France is an un- 
acknowledged derivative. But it is in Germany alone 
that as yet Napoleonism has acquired something of 
the clearness and self-sufficiency of a formulated 
creed, above all in Berlin and in the cities and towns 
that come most within the influence of BerHn. . . . 
Young Germany, the Germany of to-day, in the 
writings of Treitschke and of the followers of Treit- 
schke, studies Napoleonism, illumining politics with 
an austere and uplifting grandeur. In the writings 



RELIGION AND WAR 35 

of Nietzsche and of the followers of Nietzsche they 
study the same Napoleonism transforming the prin- 
ciples of everyday life, breathing a new spirit into 
ethics, transfiguring the tedious, half-hypocritical 
morality of an earlier generation. . . . 

" Corsica, in a word, has conquered Galilee. 

". . . To Napoleon the end of life is power, and 
the imposing of his will upon the wills of other 
men." 

This we may call neo-Odinism. Its kinship with 
ancient Odinism appears to be recognized — for 
example, one of the societies affiliated to the Pan- 
German League calls itself the League of Odin, and 
we have no difficulty in identifying the specially 
German god, the old ally of the HohenzoUern 
dynasty, with Odin. 

Just as in the days of the fall of the Roman Empire 
the struggle between Christianity and Odinism had 
to be carried on both in the spiritual and the physical 
spheres, so now, while the troops of the Allies are 
battling in the trenches for the principle that there 
is such a thing as national morality, the decisive 
conflict must take place within the hearts of the 
German people themselves. 

The inability of the German Socialist party to 
exercise any practical check upon the policy of the 
Government does not detract from the significance 
of their continual protest against the principles of 
neo-Odinism. The following is a suppressed article 
in Vorwdrts, which is stated to have been printed 
in November: 



36 PEACE AND WAR IN EUROPE 

" Man does not display all his strength and all his 
weaknesses save in exceptional situations. On the 
day of battle certain giants fall, like rotten trees 
before the tempest. The peoples, like individuals, 
reveal in times of crisis their hidden virtues or their 
unknown failings. 

" The present crisis is terrible. ... It shows us 
that the German people is stricken with a malady 
which, in the end, may prove fatal — and this malady 
is Jingoism. Thus one names a diseased nationalism 
which sees neither virtue nor courage in any nation 
but its own, and which has only insults and suspicion 
for others. 

*' Unhappily this disease appears to have seized on 
the German people at a time when the Empire was 
in a particularly flourishing condition, and it was in 
full blast even before this war broke out. 

" When war was decided on, there was an eruption 
of Jingoism of the most feverish sort. Violent articles 
appeared in the Press. In the great cities inflam- 
matory speeches were made, warlike poems were 
declaimed, and war-songs were chanted. The con- 
flagration was regarded as a fete. The campaign 
was to be a simple promenade to Paris and to 
St. Petersburg. 

**To argue the contrary was to risk being lynched. 
As soon as war was actually declared, the people of 
other nations were subjected to every insult. We 
were honest Germans ; our adversaries were ' brutal 
Russians,' * perfidious English,' ' insolent Serbs.' 
The mob tore down the signs of shops that bore 
a few words of English or French. As to who began 
the war, we were the innocent lambs, whilst the 
French, Russians, and British, were the wolves of 
the fable. Those who formerly had imputed to the 
Jews all the faults of our social state now discovered 
in England the cause of everything. 



RELIGION AND WAR 37 

" At the first victory the flags appeared, the bells 
rang, perfervid speeches were delivered in public 
places. In the restaurants nothing was sung but 
' Deutschland ueber Alles.' The public, hypnotized, 
recked nothing of the death-rattle of the wounded on 
the battlefield, of hundreds of villages in flames, of 
thousands of people robbed of all their belongings, 
of German families who awaited with anguish news 
of their sons engaged in the combat. 

"Then one heard the atrocious details of the war 
in Belgium. The inhabitants had fired on our 
soldiers. The Belgians were * assassins,' * savage 
beasts,' unworthy of any consideration. They must 
expiate their crimes by sword and fire. No one 
troubled to explain the uprising of the Belgian 
people. Our perfervid patriots could not understand 
that a people must lose its calmness on seeing itself 
unexpectedly attacked, its fields laid waste, its towns 
and villages occupied, its men sacrificed in battle. 

" Those who desire war ought to accept the evils 
that it brings. To be enthusiastic for war and then 
to descend to petty stories about dum-dum bullets is 
simply to grow besotted. Our Jingoes have yelled 
a hundred thousand times since the war began, * The 
duty of every citizen is to defend his country to his 
last breath.' Those poor wretches of Belgium and 
France, have they done anything else ? Have they 
not defended home and fatherland ? If we acted 
thus, OUR conduct would be heroic ; on the part 
of our adversaries, it is rebellion and murder. 

*' Ah ! don't let us throw stones at others, we who 
live in glass houses ! Let us not look for the mote 
in our neighbour's eye, but take the beam out of our 
own. In this way we shall make the first step 
towards Ventente internationale and towards peace. 

" Let us understand, then, that we are not merely 
Germans, French, or Russians, but that we are all 



38 PEACE AND WAR IN EUROPE 

men, that all the peoples are of the same blood, and 
that they have no right to kill one another, but that 
they ought to love and help one another. Such is 
Christian, humane conduct. Man does not belong 
to one nation only — he belongs to humanity." 

Even before the war, the world has noted the 
unceasing efforts of Kaiser Wilhelm II. to foster 
and intensify this ethical trend which I call neo- 
Odinism, and to combine it with a flaming devotion 
to the State and to the Hohenzollern dynasty. 
But it has hardly, in general, realized what a tre- 
mendous power for this purpose lay in his hands 
through the State control (which practically means 
the Emperor's control) of all University and school 
teaching, against which there has been but an in- 
effective counterpoise in the independent intellectual 
life of the smaller German states and the educa- 
tional organization of the Social Democratic party 
Professor Geddes, a year or two ago, told me how he 
had been shown the equipment of Berlin University, 
and then being entertained at dinner, and being 
called upon for a speech, he thanked the assembled 
professors for many things, and most of all '' Because 
you have taken me into your Holy of Holies, and 
there, in the innermost shrine of your University, 
you have shown me . . . the Emperor's Jack-Boots.''' 
Then one grey-haired professor jumped up, and, with 
the greatest excitement, shouted, "Yes, we do worship 
those Boots ; we would die for those Boots !" 

Out of innumerable articles written since the out- 
break of the war, dealing with the spirit of German 



RELIGION AND WAR 39 

militarism, I select a passage for quotation from the 
first of two articles in the Daily Chronicle by Mr. Ford 
Madox Hueffer, on the educational policy of the 
Kaiser, and his personal responsibility for the ill- 
balanced condition of the German mind : 

" No English officer could ever by any possibility 
expect a woman to get out of his way ; or let us put 
it that no Englishwoman would ever think of getting 
out of an officer's way. But no German woman 
would ever think of not getting out of an officer's 
way, since, by doing that, in her humble manner 
she would be assisting in however minute a degree 
in the smooth rolling onwards of the mechanism of 
the State. In such a detail this process of State 
subjection seems absurd. But it will assume a 
different aspect when you consider that to-day 
Prussian women are really entering the drawing- 
rooms of Berlin, dressed in their gayest clothes, and, 
with shining eyes and elated faces, saying, ' It is my 
joy to announce to you that my son and my husband 
died the hero's death yesterday for their King and 
their Fatherland.' 

" That is a terrible fineness ; it has been produced 
by the generation -long discipline of stepping off 
sidewalks to let Prussian officers pass by ; by the 
generation-long recognition of the fact that the State 
comes first, and that the first duty of the State is 
the waging of war. Who, then, is responsible for the 
present war ? Undoubtedly, in a sense, it is the 
Prussian people — these women with the shining 
eyes, these officers striding along the sidewalks, these 
officials sleeplessly tinkering away at the smallest 
details of the State machine, and the Prussian 
people who willingly subordinate themselves, and 
yjXio really believe that the highest and most glorious 



40 PEACE AND WAR IN EUROPE 

function of a man — of homo erectus europc^us sapiens ! 
— is to die the hero's death (den Heldentot sterben) for 
King and Fatherland." 

*' Terrible fineness " seems to me exactly the right 
term. We have to remember that this German neo- 
Odinism, like all ideas which have forcibly swayed 
the minds of men, has its element of truth and moral 
appeal as well as an element of falsity and savagery. 
We have to confess just as much as the German 
puts himself morally on a lower plane than people 
of other States by his denial of any duty to humanity 
beyond the State, he is on a higher plane in that he 
does, to a far greater extent than we do, practically 
recognize and perform his duty to the State ; and 
that German officialism for efficiency and honesty 
surpasses anything that the rest of the world can 
show. We have to confess that in ordinary times 
the average Briton, Frenchman, or Russian is a 
slacker compared with the average German. To 
leave on one side our Allies, Germany should make 
us ashamed of the extent to which we allow private 
interests to override those of the Commonwealth, 
and the quarrels of factions to imperil the general 
safety. 

We also have to recognize that the evil element 
in these Prussian ethics has, largely under cover of 
German prestige, acquired an extraordinary vogue 
throughout the world, especially in England and in 
America. It is actually at the present moment an- 
nounced that at the Oxford Union an unhappy young 
man is going to uphold the doctrine, " There are no 



RELIGION AND WAR 41 

ethics in international affairs." The doctrine is 
ridiculous, of course. Leaving aside those concep- 
tions of God and of Humanity, which almost all 
thinking men reverence, the mere fact that there are 
other nations, is bound in the long run to bring dis- 
aster upon the nation that refuses to admit any duty 
to its neighbours. 

If now we attempt to summarize the results of this 
hasty survey, we find that while the influence of 
tribal religion and of differences between Christian 
sects in creating war may be treated now as negligible, 
and the war of thirteen centuries between Christianity 
and Mohammedanism is now at last wearing to its 
end, yet there still remains, as perhaps the most 
potent force making for international war, a certain 
ethical cult of Militarism which has Berlin for its 
Mecca. That the Kaiser Wilhelm II. is the High 
Priest of this cult may be admitted, but we need not 
exaggerate his personal responsibility. Herr Sassen- 
bach told us last May, " In Germany every officer in 
the army receives the same homage and admiration 
as here you pay to an Oxford Blue." Necessarily 
the whole army is an organization for the promotion 
of a standard of values which leads to so agreeable a 
result ; and the Kaiser's force springs from the fact 
that he is a true representative of the governing 
military caste. 

But we must now attempt a deeper and more 
general analysis. For it is only in its peculiar inten- 
sity and in its particular form — e.g.y its close asso- 
ciation with a bureaucratic system of government, 

6 



42 PEACE AND WAR IN EUROPE 

and a special docility of the civil population — that 
this Odinism or Napoleonism or Militarism, or what- 
ever we may choose to call it, is specifically German or 
Prussian. Not only has it its devotees among all 
nations and at all times, but also it is obviously at 
bottom a perversion of ethical instincts that are 
essential to human nature — a perversion that results 
from exaggeration and the upsetting of the true 
balance by the ignoring of other essential principles. 
I venture to suggest that popular phrase and fable, 
in which are frequently embodied summaries of the 
sociological thought and experience of many genera- 
tions of men, give us a clue to the nature both of the 
instinctive roots of militarism and of the basis of the 
ethical forces which should control and balance those 
instincts. The phrase I refer to is the constant use 
of the word " virility " in this connection ; the fable, 
that of the loves of Venus and Mars. One delegate 
at a recent Women's Suffrage conference dropped 
the statement *' The male beast will fight," and I 
believe that most women will accept that as the 
fundamental truth about war ; on the other hand, 
there is an unlimited store of proverbial wisdom 
laying the blame for enmity between men on feminine 
influence. If we may trust popular wisdom we must 
infer that the cult of War is an intellectual outgrowth 
from an emotional base, that base being part of a 
complex of instincts closely associated with sex. If 
this be so, it is equally clear that the desire for peace, 
the hatred of destruction, the detestation of wanton 
and unnecessary suffering, and, still more, of the 



RELIGION AND WAR 43 

rising into dominance of the will to kill and wound 
and destroy, which form the emotional basis of the 
cult of Peace, are the natural psychological outgrowth 
of the maternal instincts. 

The fortunes of the struggle, therefore, between 
the cult of Peace and the cult of War will depend 
partly on the effective force of the instincts behind 
these cults respectively, and partly upon the intellec- 
tual weapons of social or ethical or religious theory, 
which the evolution of human thought supplies on 
either side. 

I have advisedly said ** maternal instincts," not 
*' instinct." If there were a single and indivisible 
maternal instinct inherited only by women, then the 
inference from what has been said above is that the 
hope of eliminating international war must depend 
on an increase in the influence of women in the 
affairs of nations, and particularly, in constitutional 
countries, on the acquisition of the franchise by 
women. That this inference is made by many is 
shown by the fact that, in general, the warmest male 
supporters of women's suffrage are keen pacifists ; 
and the strong opponents are either militarists or 
men who fear that as a consequence of the admission 
of women to political power, their own country's 
defensive forces will be weakened to a dangerous 
degree. In reality, however, the relation between 
mother and child during the long period of dependence 
of the human young, has evolved not one simple 
instinct only, but a number of instincts of considerable 
variety, each separate instinct being a tendency to 



44 PEACE AND WAR IN EUROPE 

respond to a particular call or stimulus, with a par- 
ticular type of action and a corresponding emotion, 
and most of these instincts are equally inherited by 
both sexes. The inheritance by the male of instincts 
evolved from the maternal relation may with con- 
siderable probability be regarded as the origin of the 
family grouping, which, according to the greater 
weight of sociological opinion, dates from the 
arboreal stage of human ancestry ; and the paternal 
relation so constituted again originates instincts, 
which also pass by inheritance to both sexes. The 
practical result on human character to-day we recog- 
nize by talking of ** parental " and ** protective," as 
well as " maternal," instincts. 

It may be thought that all this leads nowhere, 
seeing it is talk about the deep-rooted forces in 
human nature which are not likely to change. The 
answer is that, while these fundamental instincts 
change either in nature or intensity only by imper- 
ceptible degrees, yet the most rapid changes can 
take place in the influence exerted by the emotions 
springing from them under changing social con- 
ditions. During the last forty years there has been 
over the whole of Western Europe an extremely 
rapid fall in death-rates and an equally rapid fall in 
birth-rates. The environment in which the funda- 
mental instincts play has been profoundly modified. 
Year by year fewer babies are born ; on the average, 
the more urbanized mother has to fear a more 
difficult and painful child-birth ; with more sensitive 
nerves both parents suffer more from the troubles 



RELIGION AND WAR 45 

and cares which parentage brings. Each individual 
infant on the average costs more in anxiety and 
mental effort, not only to his own particular parents, 
but also to the community at large, which exercises 
parental functions through sanitary inspectors, 
health visitors, schools and teachers, and State and 
local legislation and administration in many other 
guises. The lower the birth-rate and the greater the 
care spent on each child born, the less complacently 
will people look forward to the destruction of life on 
the battlefield, whether they think in the phrase 
Kanonen-futter or Heldentot. 

Also, while fewer babies are born, each baby, on 
the average, stays longer in the world. With the 
decline of the death-rate, the proportion of old and 
middle-aged increases. The view of life of the old 
and middle-aged counts for more, relatively to that 
of the young, merely because there are more of them 
to count. In this way also, quite apart from any 
change in individual character, the mass-psychology 
of the nations is being changed speedily ; the young 
may be just as fiery, but their fire has to encounter 
a greater mass of middle-aged caution and phlegm. 

Again, while the innate characteristics of man 
may be regarded as for practical purposes un- 
changeable, the average effective character can be 
greatly changed by a change in educational methods. 
Kaiser Wilhelm, in the same year in which he dis- 
missed Bismarck, instructed the teachers of Germany 
that it was their duty to provide soldiers of the right 
sort, and to combat social democracy. Germany, 



46 PEACE AND WAR IN EUROPE 

like Sparta of old, set to work to foster militarism 
by education. But in this respect she was running 
counter to the general course of educational progress 
throughout the world, though, indeed, with such 
force as to create a considerable eddy, and to stimu- 
late militarist tendencies in our own schools. Yet, 
I believe, the biggest change in the upbringing of 
boys throughout the English-speaking countries is 
in the opposite direction, though it is one which has 
been almost overlooked. From a period of unknown 
antiquity the education of boys has been dominated 
by the idea that boys must not be girls. For girls 
dolls were appropriate ; it was right that in them the 
maternal instinct should be early aroused. But woe 
to the boy who wanted to play with his sister's doll ! 
Suddenly that sex disability was, in effect, swept 
away. Mr. Theodore Rooseveldt stood for the 
Presidency of America, and Teddy Bears appeared 
in every home, to be loved and cherished by boys 
and girls equally. They appealed to instincts equally 
present in both. It is impossible to judge of the 
nature or extent of the future result of this new 
influence on the development of character ; but we 
may be sure it will have its influence. 

My general conclusion is that the effective force 
of the maternal instinct, the emotional basis of 
Pacifism, is, and has been for the last forty years, 
increasing very rapidly. It is also, I believe, a fact, 
and if so certainly a fact of equal importance, that 
the general trend of scientific thought during the 
past century has swept away what intellectual basis 



RELIGION AND WAR 47 

there was for militarism, and supplied new arguments 
on the other side. The great scientific achievements 
of the eighteenth century were in the field of physics 
and chemistry, and Newton was the representative 
man of science, Newton the physicist, astronomer, 
and Master of the Mint. By the end of the century 
a science, or pseudo-science, of economics was built 
up, which justified war as one of the methods of 
checking the too great redundancy of population. 
But throughout the nineteenth century the greatest 
scientific achievements have been in the field of 
biology, and in working out the principles of heredity 
and racial progress. Consequently, except in intel- 
lectual backwaters, it is now recognized that the 
problems of human life must be considered with 
even greater care from the standpoint of eugenics 
than from that of economics. The working out of 
valid conclusions from that standpoint is one of the 
great tasks of the twentieth century, and we cannot 
anticipate the results. But already, in England, 
France, and Germany, people are thinking of the 
war in the terms of eugenics. War claims the best 
of the manhood of each nation — and destroys it. 
Each country may rejoice that its young men have 
shown that they can die the hero-death ; but it 
cannot forget that war did not create their heroism, 
it was only the test that showed it was already 
there. War selects the hero for slaughter, so that 
the inheritance of heroism for the next and all sub- 
sequent generations is cut off. 

Meanwhile war in its character grows with each 
example more grimly terrible — and less romantic. 



LECTURE III 

NATIONALISM AND IMPERIALISM 

While the present war arises partly from the con- 
flict of economic interests, and is in greater measure 
a contest between opposing ethical ideals, it is 
primarily and directly the result of the clash of 
Imperialist and Nationalist ideals, of Empire against 
Empire, and of Empire against Nation. 

A Polish sociologist, M. de Majewski, has enun- 
ciated a striking theory with regard to nationality. 
Reality, according to him, exists in four grades : 
Reality A, which is the Atom ; Reality B, the Cell ; 
Reality C, the Individual Organism ; and Reality D, 
the Nation. The cell, he argues, is built up out of 
atoms, and the body out of cells, by co-ordination, 
and the creation of a union of a higher rank out of 
existences of the lower rank depends upon their 
adjustment to one another in co-operation and with 
differentiation. Human aggregations, therefore, to 
meet the test of being real social units, must be built 
up on those two principles of co-ordination in their 
activities and differentiation in their separate func- 
tions ; and this can only take place through mental 
contact. Since mental contact again depends upon 

48 



NATIONALISM AND IMPERIALISM 49 

language, language alone, and not government, re- 
ligion or race, determines true nationality. Like all 
nice, clear-cut theories about human affairs this one is 
open to much criticism, and it attains its neatness 
and simplicity by emphasizing one element in a com- 
plex situation and ignoring others. But the element 
it emphasizes is of the first importance, and we may 
take it not only as representing the Polish view, but 
also as giving a clue to the creation of national 
sentiment in countries where it has recently developed. 
It is indeed possible for true nationality to exist 
among a people though divided among themselves by 
language, as, for instance, in Belgium, which speaks 
French and Flemish ; in Switzerland, which speaks 
German, Swiss-German, French, and Romansch. 
Fundamentally, what creates national unity is not a 
common medium of thought, but the possession of 
a common content of thought, and the memories of 
sorrows and joys shared in common may create a 
national unity in spite of differences of language. On 
the other hand, it would be difficult to over-estimate 
the importance of unity of language. We see at the 
present time the internal strain to which Switzerland 
is subjected through the tendency of German- 
speaking Switzerland to sympathize with Germany, 
and French-speaking Switzerland to sympathize 
with France. In the Balkan Peninsula the nine- 
teenth century saw the development, in one State 
after another, first of a quickened desire for educa- 
tion, then the diffusion of literature through districts 
linked together by unity of language, and then on 

7 



50 PEACE AND WAR IN EUROPE 

the basis of the possession of a common medium of 
thought, the acquisition of a common body of 
thought, from which arose more and more imperative 
demands for the means of common action. If, then, 
we try to answer that question now so frequently 
put, What is nationahty ? I think we can best say 
that nationahty is the result of the possession of 
a common body of thought which inspires a common 
emotion, and that a man is of the nationality to 
which he thinks he belongs. 

The relation of the spirit of nationality to war 
depends much on the tone of the national feeling, 
which varies in character and intensity among the 
peoples of Europe. I remember, nearly thirty years 
ago, a Pole reciting to me his National Anthem, and 
the intense excitement that it roused in him. I 
asked him to translate it, but he would only tell me 
that its dominant thought was that of wading to 
Moscow through a sea of Russian blood. In countries 
like England and Russia, which have had freedom 
from foreign domination during the whole of the 
period in which they have possessed the conscious- 
ness of national unity, national feeling lacks that 
spirit of bitterness ; while, on the other hand, in 
nations whose history has been one of subjection, 
like Poland and Ireland, it is lacking in the element 
of pride. But when a nation cherishes the memories 
of past greatness, of subjection, and yet again, of 
emancipation, then there is both bitterness and pride 
in its national feeling ; and the highest level of 
intensity may be reached. 



NATIONALISM AND IMPERIALISM 51 

Such a history, I need hardly say, has been that 
of Italy and Germany; it is less recognized that it is 
emphatically that of Serbia. The time of Serb great- 
ness, when Serbia held rank among the more highly 
civilized States of Europe was as far back as the 
fourteenth century. It was in the year 1389 that 
Serbia fell before the tide of Turkish conquest at 
Kossovo. Then followed centuries of slow degrada- 
tion and impoverishment, varied by rebeUion and 
massacre, till in 1829, with the help of Russia, a 
certain measure of autonomy was secured. Her 
history for the past hundred years has been one of 
most painfully slow, but yet continual, progress 
towards liberty and unity. A young Serb recently 
said to me that he feared that the crushing of the 
armies of his country by Austria was imminent, but 
in that case his people would revert to guerilla 
warfare, that they would never surrender. If on 
conclusion of war the Allies failed to realize the 
importance of the Serbian question, and endeavoured 
to settle it by compromise, such a settlement would 
only be the prelude for fresh wars. All that made 
life really worth Uving for him, and those who 
thought like him, was dependent upon the attainment 
of the complete unity and liberty of the whole Serbian 
race and the attainment of that greater Serbia which 
should include Slavonia, Croatia, Dalmatia, Bosnia, 
and Herzegovina. 

I have already dealt with the motives which im- 
pelled the decision of the German and Austrian 
Empires that Serbia should be crushed. What we 



52 PEACE AND WAR IN EUROPE 

have witnessed during these months displays in 
letters of fire the termination of her people that 
Serbia shall not be crushed, and that no Imperial 
ambitions of any empire whatsoever shall deprive 
them of their dearly won liberties, or induce them to 
resign their cherished hopes. Thus Imperialism 
meets nationality ; and the coUision plunges Europe 
into war. 

Whenever such a collision takes place between 
a great empire which seems actuated by ** the will 
to power " displaying itself in a will to expand, and a 
small nation that makes no claim for domination 
over aliens, but only demands freedom and unity for 
itself, it is the small nation that commands the 
general sympathy of humanity, and very emphatically 
our own sympathies when we are in the position 
of unbiassed neutrals. We glory in the memory of 
how Sir Philip Sydney died for Holland and Lord 
Byron for Greece, and of the Englishmen who fought 
with Garibaldi. We hear frequent references to the 
sanctity of nationality as a necessary Hnk between 
the narrow circles of the family, and of personal 
friendship, which most easily draw out our affections, 
and the whole of humanity to which we admit a duty 
of brotherly love, but which baffles imagination by 
its multiplicity and the immensity of its moral 
distances. 

No one, I imagine, has more nobly expressed this 
view than Joseph Mazzini. Out of many passages 
that might be chosen, take these from '' The Duties 
of Man": 



NATIONALISM AND IMPERIALISM 53 

** O my brothers, love your Country ! Our country 
is our Home, the house that God has given us, 
placing therein a numerous family that loves us, and 
whom we love ; a family with whom we sympathize 
more readily, and whom we understand more quickly 
than we do others; and which, from its being centred 
round a given spot, and from the homogeneous 
nature of its elements, is adapted to a special form of 
activity. . . . 

" In labouring for our own country on the right 
principle, we labour for Humanity. . . . 

" Humanity is a vast army advancing to the 
conquest of lands unknown, against enemies both 
powerful and astute. The peoples are the different 
corps, the divisions of that army. Each of them has 
its post assigned to it, and its special operation to 
execute; and the common victory depends on the 
exactitude with which these distinct operations shall 
be fulfilled. Disturb not the order of battle. Forsake 
not the banner given you by God. . . . Say not /, 
but we. Let each man among you strive to incarnate 
his country in himself. Let each man among you 
regard himself as a guarantee, responsible for his 
fellow-countrymen, and learn so to govern his actions 
as to cause his country to be loved and respected 
through him. Your country is the sign of the mission 
God has given you to fulfil towards Humanity. The 
faculties and forces of all her sons should be associated 
in the accomplishment of that mission. . . . 

*' Never deny your sister nations. Be it yours 
to evolve the life of your country in loveliness and 
strength ; free from all servile fears or sceptical 
doubts ; maintaining as its basis the People ; as its 
guide the consequences of the principles of its 
Religious Faith, logically and energetically applied ; 
its strength, the united strength of all ; its aim, the 
fulfilment of the mission given to it by God. 



54 PEACE AND WAR IN EUROPE 

** And so long as you are ready to die for Humanity, 
the life of your country will be immortal." 

The Nationalism that responds to these appeals — 
** Never deny your sister nations!" *' Be ready to 
die for Humanity" — is, I am inclined to think, the 
basis of the hopes for the future of humanity of 
many people of European countries who are in- 
cluded under the loose name " Liberals." It is, for 
example, the idea which in the eyes of many of his 
admirers Gladstone stood for when he emerged from 
political retirement to thunder against the Bulgarian 
atrocities. The article quoted above from Vorwdrts 
echoes Mazzini's thought, almost his phrases. The 
organization of the world into national States, each 
inspired by this form of Nationalism, is indeed a 
noble ideal. 

Unfortunately we have to admit that there is also a 
baser and that a more familiar type — the Nationalism 
which demands liberty and integrity and sovereignty 
for itself, but for itself alone. Starting from Shakes- 
peare, whose favourite hero was Henry V., the 
originator of one of the most criminal and rightly 
disastrous wars of aggression on record, we might go 
through the whole of our own patriotic poetry, and 
then through that of nation after nation, and find 
very little that is wholly free from the taint of either 
hatred or envy or scorn of the foreigner. I doubt if 
there is a nation with an organized system of educa- 
tion whose school histories do not in effect falsify the 
record of the national dealings with other countries 
either by omission or by unfair emphasis. This was 



NATIONALISM AND IMPERIALISM 55 

first brought home to my mind a number of years 
ago when for the first and only time I visited 
Versailles. Among the countless battle pictures I 
amused myself by looking for Crecy and Poitiers. 
They were not to be found ; but I did find numerous 
pictures representing battles of that time which I 
had never heard of. I wondered then what sort of 
record of the wars of Edward III. the French school- 
boy reads. Our boys get the impression that those 
wars were a brilliant series of English victories. 
But seeing that, as a matter of fact, the chief result 
of those wars was the expulsion of the English King 
from the vast French dominions which he had in- 
herited from his ancestors, French schoolbooks may 
tell the story in a very different way, and yet not less 
accurately. 

I need hardly point out that Nationalism of this 
narrow type is a potent force for war. So well is 
this recognized that the main effort of organized 
Peace propaganda has been directed to combating 
it, by promoting better acquaintance between nations, 
in the hope that mutual knowledge will lead at least 
to mutual respect. 

But those who seek for international peace by way 
of a world of free, independent, sovereign nations 
mutually respecting one another's rights, and sinking 
hostilities in a friendly rivalry for primacy in service 
to humanity, find themselves face to face, not only 
with the British Empire, a somewhat solid fact, but 
also with a fairly clearly marked tendency through- 
out the world towards the aggregation of nationali- 



56 PEACE AND WAR IN EUROPE 

ties into empires, and this fact it is fatal to ignore. 
We have to turn, therefore, to the examination of 
the nature of Empire and of ImperiaHsm. 

Professor Geddes has said that '' every Empire is 
the Empire of a City." We may argue that this is 
an overstatement, alleging that it would be more 
correct to call the Austrian Empire the Empire of 
the Hapsburgs, or the German Empire the Empire 
of the Hohenzollerns, than to regard them as the 
Empires of Vienna and Berlin respectively. Never- 
theless, the statement is generally true, and, more- 
over, we find that European empires derive their 
origin ultimately from the City-state of the Medi- 
terranean. First there were struggles of the greater 
and more successful of the trading cities possessed of 
protected seaports, like Athens, and, on a larger 
scale, Sidon, Tyre, and Carthage, for wider spheres 
of exploitation ; then Rome came into collision with 
Carthage, and gave the world not only the name, 
but a new type of the reality of empire. Professor 
Geddes suggested that an empire might be defined 
as the area exploited by a particular city ; but 
here again we note that empires founded purely upon 
exploitation, however powerful in appearance, are 
built of iron mixed with clay. The secret of the 
triumph of Rome was that Rome possessed an ideal 
of imperial law and justice, imperfectly realized, no 
doubt, but still sufficiently powerful for Cicero to 
appeal to it and Virgil to boast of it. 

We are accustomed to look upon the Romans as 
soldiers and conquerors who loved war and domi- 



NATIONALISM AND IMPERIALISM 57 

nated alien populations by the might of their legions. 
No idea could be farther from the truth. At the 
height of its power the Roman Empire, with a 
frontier of thousands of miles, stretching from the 
Firth of Clyde through the forests of Germany, the 
plain of Southern Russia, the borders of Persia, 
Arabia, the Sahara to the Atlantic Ocean, only 
maintained in the whole of its armies and navies 
about the same number of men as Serbia alone has 
been putting in the field in the present war. 

The strength of the Roman Empire lay in the 
services it rendered to the countries that were com- 
prised within it, and the true symbols of the Empire 
w^ere not so much the Roman eagles as the Roman 
high-roads, aqueducts, municipal institutions, and 
the spread of the cultivation of the most useful 
plants and trees, and, most of all, that system of 
Roman law which is the foundation of the jurispru- 
dence of the world. 

On this account Dante, who was perhaps the 
most enlightened political thinker as well as the 
greatest poet of the Middle Ages, regarded the 
Empire as equally sacred with the Church, and 
selected for consignment to the bottom pit of hell as 
the world's three greatest criminals, Judas Iscariot, 
Brutus, and Cassius. There, in an atmosphere of 
the intensest cold, the devil perpetually champs 
with his teeth the supreme traitor of Christianity 
and the mortal enemies of the Imperial idea. 

The Roman Empire fell, partly as a result of 
assaults from without, partly through certain deadly 

8 



58 PEACE AND WAR IN EUROPE 

causes of internal weakness. The spread of malaria 
in Italy and Greece sapped the physical and moral 
vigour of the peoples whose native civilization the 
Empire created and extended ; and the development 
of great landed estates cultivated by slave labour 
destroyed the peasantry. Both these facts have 
their obvious moral for Britain. But far more sig- 
nificant for our instruction, as well as more pertinent 
to this discussion, is the third source of Rome's 
weakness. Rome failed to maintain the springs of 
local energy and public spirit. The Empire was, by 
degrees, entirely centralized. There was too little 
scope for disinterested activity between the in- 
dividual citizen and the distant Imperial power. 
For lack of local public spirit and power of inde- 
pendent organized effort the Empire had no defence 
when once the Imperial legions failed to hold in 
check the attacks of the barbarians ; and no doubt it 
was mainly because each part of the Empire desired 
to share as lightly as possible in the burden of 
defence, that the armies, as a whole, became inade- 
quate for their task. 

The Roman is the mother of existing European 
empires. This is true of the British Empire, for 
when the Western Empire fell and Rome itself was 
captured by barbarians, one distant city on the banks 
of the Thames remained unconquered. Though 
London afterwards was willing to acknowledge 
Jutish, Saxon, Danish, and Norman Kings, yet the 
political history of our country may be described as 
deahng with the spread of London dominion in 



NATIONALISM AND IMPERIALISM 59 

succession over England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, 
and the vast dominions beyond the sea. It is true 
of the Central European empires. The crowning 
of Charlemagne as the first Emperor of the Holy 
Roman Empire was the result of the desire of the 
Prankish conqueror to succeed to the ancient Empire 
rather than to destroy it. The '* Holy Roman 
Empire" was perhaps never holy; it ceased soon 
to be Roman and became German, and the power 
of its feudal Princes was so much greater than that 
of their overlord, that it was no empire in the 
Roman sense; but it lasted from a.d. 800 to 1804, 
when it was converted into an Austrian Empire, 
thereby leaving a gap to be filled in 1871 by the 
creation of the present German Empire, which has 
learnt its aspirations partly from the Holy Roman 
Empire in its most brilliant periods, partly from the 
British Empire, and partly from Rome. As for 
France, in the reign of Louis XIV. Paris became 
an Imperial city, avowedly imitating and emulating 
the Augustan epoch. Napoleon was a copyist of 
Julius Caesar, and since 1870 Paris has rescued 
Algiers, Tunis, and Morocco from Mohammedan 
rule, and begun to regain for them the prosperity 
and civilization which they enjoyed under Rome, 
and has carried the Latin tradition and civilization 
into regions where Caesar's eagles never flew. Lastly, 
as has been pointed out above, the Russian Empire 
— the Empire of Moscow and of Petrograd — has the 
same filial connection with the Eastern Empire and 
with Constantinople as London has with Rome. 



6o PEACE AND WAR IN EUROPE 

The Portuguese, Dutch, and to a less extent the 
Spanish, Empires, show a reversion to the Cartha- 
ginian type. 

This strange fact about the Roman Empire that, 
when apparently destroyed, it springs up again in 
the form of many empires, is very significant. 
Does it mean that empire, like nationality, is a 
necessary phase in the evolution of human society? 

Leaving that question aside for the moment, we 
note that Imperialism is a fertile mother of wars. 
There are frontier wars occurring in the progress of 
Imperial expansion, as the French, Italian, and 
British wars in Africa, and the wars on the frontier 
of India. There are the wars in which an expanding 
empire comes into conflict with a free nation, and 
endeavours to absorb it or bring it to a condition of 
subservience. There are the wars which result from 
revolting nationalities comprised within the sphere 
of a decaying empire, like the War of Greek Inde- 
pendence. Lastly, there are the wars of empire 
against empire. 

The play of the forces of Nationalist and Imperialist 
feeling in the present war is most complex and 
various. In the first place, we have to note that 
while Imperialism is not necessarily irreconcilable 
with nationality, yet in the case of the Austrian 
Empire its very basis is the denial of nationality. 
The history during the nineteenth century of the 
Austrian Empire has been that of a continual contest 
between the two dominating nationalities, the Teuton 
and the Magyar, which finally have reached a sort of 



NATIONALISM AND IMPERIALISM 6i 

insecure harmony, by combining to oppress the other 
nationahties which comprise the majority of the 
total population — the Poles, Italians, Roumanians, 
Czechs, and Serbs. Then, again, between Germany 
and France there is the issue of Alsace-Lorraine and 
the wounded national feeling of France. On the 
East there is the issue of Poland, that pathetic land, 
where true national feeling has been growing in 
intensity ever since national existence perished. 
Lastly, there are the three inter-Imperial struggles — 
that between Germany and France for the domina- 
tion of Morocco ; that between Germany and Russia 
for hegemony in the Balkan Peninsula; and that 
between Germany and Britain for the supremacy of 
the seas. 

Good people, it seems to me, are apt to be a gene- 
ration behind the times in their thinking. The 
aspirants after peace and human brotherhood have 
taken nationality into account, but hitherto, I fear, 
they have failed to grasp the power of the forces 
which are creating the political reconstruction of the 
world in great empires. Many of them seem to have 
no use for the idea of empire ; they thrust it out of 
their minds, as something that disturbs their system 
of thought with regard to the great ideals they have 
adopted, and the plan for attaining them which they 
have conceived. It is a fatal habit of mind ; it prac- 
tically results in making a present to the Odinists of 
the growing forces behind Imperiahsm. 

How rapidly these forces are growing may be 
judged from one or two examples. Sixty years ago 



62 PEACE AND WAR IN EUROPE 

our statesmen thrust the Orange River Colony, against 
its will, out of the Empire, and compelled it to be 
independent. In the current phrase of that time 
the Colonies were regarded as a burden on the 
Mother Country. Twelve years ago we sacrificed 
^250,000,000, the lives of twenty thousand British 
soldiers, and over twenty thousand women and chil- 
dren who died in the Concentration Camps, and 
uncounted thousands of men, women, and children, 
who died on the veldt, in a war, the result, if not the 
object, of which was to bring the Orange River 
Colony with the Transvaal back into the Imperial 
circle. Bismarck, after the Franco-Prussian War, 
held that colonies were good things for Germany to 
encourage Continental rivals to possess, but un- 
desirable acquisitions for Germany herself. Some 
twelve years afterwards either he was converted to 
the contrary opinion or overruled, and he acquired 
dominions many times as great in area as Germany 
in Africa and the Far East. Since then the German 
Empire in distant lands has grown, but not nearly 
so fast as the appetite for more. 

I must ask your pardon for dwelling on such 
obvious and familiar facts, but we are apt to miss the 
significance of facts, sometimes in consequence of 
their very familiarity. Can you call to mind the 
appearance of the political map of the world now as 
compared with fifty years ago ? At the present time 
the whole of Africa, with the exception of the rugged 
mountains of Abyssinia and the minute strip of 
Liberia, is parcelled out among the European Powers. 



NATIONALISM AND IMPERIALISM 63 

In Asia we have the huge dominions of Russia, 
Britain, and France, together with what may prob- 
ably become a Chino-Japanese Federation, occupying 
almost the whole of that mighty continent. If we 
turn to the New World, we find even the United 
States drawn or driven along the Imperial road, and 
while the destinies of South and Central America 
remain a puzzle, we can have little doubt that they 
will involve, somehow or other, aggregation into 
larger units. Gibbon estimated the population of 
the Roman Empire at one hundred and twenty 
millions, and expressed the opinion that so great a 
number of human beings had never been united 
under any other single government. To-day by far 
the larger part of humanity is comprised in empires 
of a greater magnitude, and, apart from the present 
war, which may, or may not, hasten the process, the 
disproportion has been tending to become over- 
whelming. 

The explanation of this as a development of the 
last half-century, is very simple. The tendency of 
empires to aggrandizement has always been in exist- 
ence, but certain checks, very powerful in the past, 
have largely ceased to operate. The area which can 
effectively be ruled from a given centre is limited by 
the distance from that centre, but the distance must 
be reckoned not in miles, but in time ; and not even 
so much in the time necessary for the transport of 
troops and supplies, as in that required for the com- 
munication of information to, and orders from, the 
governing centre. While the time required for 



64 PEACE AND WAR IN EUROPE 

transport has been cut down, and continues to be 
cut down, by railways and steam navigation, that 
required for communication has been practically 
annihilated by the telegraph. In the centre of Africa 
and over the islands of the Pacific, the wireless 
station and the thin line of copper wire are the most 
significant symbols of empire. 

But these revolutions in the conditions of trans- 
port and communication are only the removal of a 
check to Imperial expansion, the forces that create 
that expansion have still to be looked for. The word 
** empire" means, properly, "military command" — 
which is, perhaps, in itself a reason why Pacifists 
dislike it — and among the most powerful motives for 
expansion is the desire for military strength. In 
general, an increase in the size of an empire adds to 
its total force for war, though not at all in proportion 
to the increment. The British Isles have a popula- 
tion of some forty-five millions, the British Empire 
of some four hundred and twenty millions. The 
whole Empire is more effective in war than these 
islands alone would be, but it is very far from being 
nine times as effective. 

On the other hand, we must not forget that one 
of the duties of a general is to prevent his soldiers 
from killing one another, and the Pax Romana or 
Pax Britannica is a fact which is not to be decried, 
either in its vast present importance or in its hope 
for the future. Think what this means — that in 
spite of all the terrible slaughter and destruction 
now taking place, all the belligerent States taken 



NATIONALISM AND IMPERIALISM 65 

together will probably have a greater population 
on August I, 1915, than they had on August i, 
1914. 

Now, one sort ot Imperialism—a sort which in- 
evitably provokes war — is in reality at bottom a 
narrow, aggressive Nationalism, desiring to stamp its 
peculiar features upon other races or civilizations. 
When we see this in action in Belgium it horrifies 
us, yet we have our own advocates in England of 
this very type of Imperialism. In one of the most 
interesting passages in Von Bernhardi's ** Germany 
and the Next War," he quotes Lord Rosebery as 
having said at the Royal Colonial Institute on 
March i, 1893: "It is said that our Empire is 
already large enough, and does not need expansion. 
. . . We shall have to consider, not what we want 
now, but what we want in the future. . . . We 
have to remember that it is part of our responsibility 
and heritage to take care that the world, so far as 
can be moulded by us, should receive the Anglo- 
Saxon, and not another, character." And most 
characteristically his comment is, '* That is a great 
and proud thought which the Englishman then 
expressed." If Bernhardi could see nothing ugly in 
such Imperialism in an Englishman, it is scarcely to 
be expected that the general body of German opinion 
can see anything ugly in it when " German " is 
substituted for " Anglo-Saxon." And yet it is per- 
fectly clear that the British Empire would now be on 
the point of crumbling to pieces if Lord Rosebery's 
type of Imperialism had been allowed to dominate 

9 



66 PEACE AND WAR IN EUROPE 

our policy completely instead of only perverting it 
occasionally. 

To get to grips with the question as to what this 
modern Law of Imperial Expansion means for our 
hopes of peace, I think we must inquire into the 
psychology of Imperialism. The late Mr. Hubert 
Bland dealt with this subject in one of his articles in 
the Sunday Chronicle. Taking himself as an example 
of the typical Imperialist, he said, if I remember 
rightly, that he was full of affection for every subject 
of the Empire, but that his sympathies for all people 
outside were cool. If this introspection was accurate, 
Mr. Bland must have been a psychological miracle. 
It is natural to us to love a brother-Englishman more 
than an Italian or a Hollander ; for it is easier to 
understand him, to realize his material sufferings 
and mental troubles, and that normal psychological 
fact is a real foundation for national sentiment. But 
how can you love a KafBr as your fellow British sub- 
ject merely because he sets up his kraal on the eastern 
side of Longitude 20 degrees, in British South Africa, 
and become quite indifferent to him as an alien 
if he happens to live a few yards away across 
that imaginary line, in German territory ? I believe 
many of our Imperialists do try to cultivate this 
sentiment, but their geographical knowledge is not 
always equal to the strain. A few years ago some of 
our halfpenny papers which had poured obloquy on 
Mr. Keir Hardie during the South African War as a 
pro-Boer, later denounced him as a pro-Zulu. The 
writers unfortunately forgot that the Zulus are British 



NATIONALISM AND IMPERIALISM 67 

subjects, so that the Englishman who is not a pro- 
Zulu is an offensive sort of Little Englander. 

The sentiment of Imperialism, in fact, is, to use 
a metaphor from chemistry, an unstable compound. 
It ends either to decompose into the simpler com- 
pound of selfish Nationalism, or to be a stepping-stone 
to a higher ethics. Whether the fact of empire is 
going to be a curse or a blessing to humanity depends 
upon whether empires are dominated by the narrow 
national spirit of one or more of the peoples who 
comprise them, or whether they can attain to broader 
and more comprehensive sympathies. And the ques- 
tion whether the British Empire itself is Ukely to 
survive hangs on the same issue. 

When next Empire Day comes round, school- 
masters and after-dinner speakers may be recom- 
mended to take for a text Mazzini's words, with a 
special application : ** Never deny your sister-nations 
in the British Empire." Never deny them just and 
equal treatment in act, or word, or thought. If they 
are European or Asiatic, never call them Hottentots. 
Never refuse to allow their national aspirations the 
same validity as your own. Above all, never attempt 
to penalize their language nor to force their manner 
of thinking into uncongenial channels ; and learn to 
rejoice in the variety of achievement which becomes 
possible by the full development of the various 
natural gifts of many races of men of different 
climes. 

If the British Empire stands to-day, it stands 
because at certain critical times those who ruled it 



68 PEACE AND WAR IN EUROPE 

had their eyes opened and acted on those principles, 
as when Lord Durham gave self-government to 
Canada and Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman to 
South Africa, when it was resolved to give equal 
rights to the Boer Taal, and when the Government 
of India recognized the practice of adoption by native 
Indian Princes. 

The passing out of the National into the Imperial 
stage of political evolution is to be regarded as a 
forward stride in human progress, which brings its 
own great dangers side by side with its possibilities. 
It demands a new ethical development, failing which 
it must needs be calamitous. But if human nature 
responds to the call, if we, for example, achieve real 
and effective sympathy for Cingalese and Punjabi, 
for the Arunta in the central desert of Australia and 
the Eskimo dwelling by Melville Sound, we are so 
near to the Christian state of mind of love for all 
men that the final transition should not be im- 
possible. 

Dante wrote *' De Monarchia " to vindicate the 
claims of the Holy Roman Empire. He held that, 
just as all humanity should be gathered into one true 
and universal Christian Church, whose head must 
be a Vicar of Christ upon earth, all kingdoms and 
principalities and cities should form one holy and 
world-wide empire, whose Emperor must also be 
another Vicar of Christ, exercising a parallel dominion 
in temporal affairs to that of the Pope in spiritual 
affairs. Nineteenth-century thinkers preferred to 
look forward to union of the nations without such a 



NATIONALISM AND IMPERIALISM 69 

personal head, and expressed the idea in the phrase 
*'the federation of the world." In whatever terms 
we conceive it, the imaginations of many of us refuse 
to be content with any political ideal short of such a 
unity. But facts appear to indicate that the destined 
path thither lies through the gathering together of 
larger and larger aggregations of humanity. 



LECTURE IV 

ARMAMENTS 

One of the oldest maxims with regard to war that 
has come down to us is conveyed in the pithy 
question put by Solon to Croesus when the Lydian 
King showed him his treasures of gold : " But how 
will you fare if some other King makes war against 
you who has more and better iron ?" 

In the history of war, as it is popularly taught, 
we hear a great deal — perhaps too much — about the 
military importance of the valour of soldiers and 
about the skill of the generals. The importance of 
numbers is also, to a certain extent, indicated. The 
importance of the control of the supply of weapons 
and of the material for manufacturing the imple- 
ments of war is only fitfully recognized. Our school- 
boys do have the importance of the part played by 
the English long-bow at Crecy explained to them ; 
but when the Armada is dealt with the real factors 
that decided the issue are left obscure. There is a 
monument on Plymouth Hoe to commemorate the 
defeat of the Armada with the inscription on it, " He 
blew with His winds and they were scattered." 
This suggests that the weather was the decisive 
factor, whereas, in fact, the Armada was beaten by 
the English, and it was not until it was in flight that 

70 



ARMAMENTS 71 

it suffered from the storms. The secret of the 
defeat of the Armada is that the English ships not 
only were better sailers than the Spanish, but also 
carried heavier guns, so that they could keep out of 
range and yet bombard the enemy. I, for one, 
never knew this till I found it in Froude's history of 
the expedition collected from Spanish sources. In 
the naval wars of the seventeenth century against 
the Dutch it was again the factor of the conditions 
of manufacture of the material of war that decided 
the issue of the struggle. In numbers of sailors, 
seamanship, financial resources, and leadership the 
Dutch were in every way our equals ; but they drew 
their timber-supply from the pine forests of the 
Baltic, whereas the English ships were built of oak, 
with the result that in the process of equal cannon- 
ading the Dutch ship sank first. In the great 
Napoleonic wars you have to go to military writers 
to find any mention of the serious handicap under 
which the French laboured for lack of saltpetre. 
Though they ransacked their country and dug up 
old stables and cowsheds, they could never get 
enough of this essential constituent of gunpowder 
to be able to afford supplies of ammunition for 
practising. The English troops were only moder- 
ately trained, but, in comparison with the French, 
the fire of our infantry was deadly in its accuracy. 

While the influence of superiority in armaments 
upon the affairs of nations engaged in wars has 
thus been only inadequately explored, the part 
played by the same factor in determining whether 
war shall or shall not take place has been left in 



^2 PEACE AND WAR IN EUROPE 

still greater obscurity. I have referred, or example, 
to both the economic and the religious forces con- 
cerned in the barbarian incursions which destroyed 
the Roman Empire. It is quite possible that no 
less importance ought to be assigned to the activities 
of the traders who led their caravans from the Black 
Sea to the Baltic, and opened up trade with Sweden, 
and there found rich deposits of iron ore peculiarly 
suitable for the making of spears and swords. The 
maxim si vis pacem pava helhim is obviously a mixture 
of truth and falsehood. It is a security to peace 
that countries which desire it should be believed to 
be ready for war. War becomes certain when the 
country that desires it believes its preparations are 
adequate to secure victory. 

To all war preparations we can apply the broad 
sociological principle that a social need creates a 
social organization, and that the social organization, 
once it is created, acquires an independent life of 
its own, which struggles for existence even at the 
expense of the well-being of society. Because war 
has been an actual recurring historical fact, nations 
have been obliged to prepare for war and to create a 
great organization — Army, Navy, arsenals, fortifica- 
tions, spies, to say nothing of diplomatists and Press 
bureaux. This organization, once created, is con- 
tinually striving for its own aggrandizement. It is 
jealous of the expenditure of national resources for 
the purposes that elevate life and advance civilization. 
It is continually looking for evidence that its services 
will be required and its existence justified. 

Now, the professional feeling of the Army and 



ARMAMENTS 73 

Navy for its own aggrandizement is something which 
is fairly well understood, and which works mostly 
in the open, and which, therefore, the ordinary 
citizen is, to a certain extent, on his guard against, 
except in those countries in which, for historic 
reasons, the importance of a military element in 
society is pecuHarly aggrandized. The Army and 
Navy in England have usually been kept in a certain 
degree of subordination, because they are national 
services, and while they yield salaries and pay to 
great numbers of men they yield profits to com- 
paratively few. The case is different with the third 
factor in defence — the making of implements of 
war, from cartridges to Dreadnoughts. This, in the 
main, is done by the vast industrial companies 
which are more or less international in their organi- 
zation, and which tend in each country in which 
they are established to develop practical monopolies. 
It is one of the dangers characteristic of this trade 
that the prosperity of a particular firm depends very 
largely upon its success in opening up foreign 
markets by bribing those who have influence on 
Governments, and the prosperity of the trade as a 
whole depends upon its success in fostering inter- 
national hatred, jealousy, distrust, and mutual fear. 

A great deal has been said, as, for example, by 
Mr. Philip Snowden in the House of Commons, 
upon the sinister significance of the great ammunition 
firms. The particular point that I wish to elaborate 
is the difference between the way in which this 
influence has worked upon England on the one hand 
and Germany on the other. 10 



74 PEACE AND WAR IN EUROPE 

In Germany the greatest of the firms that supply 
munitions of war is Krupps', of Essen. It is said to 
employ between fifty and sixty thousand men, and 
it certainly has the very closest relations with the 
German Government. The dividends distributed 
among the proprietors exceed ^f 1,000,000 per annum, 
and it is also able to spend great sums of money in 
bribery in various countries, and in fomenting 
militarist opinion in Germany. I imagine that we 
shall all be agreed that the firm of Krupps' exercises 
a very potent and malignant influence upon Germany. 
But yet we have to recognize that it has never sacri- 
ficed the military efficiency of the Empire of 
Germany to its own profits. For example, though 
it did enter into a contract to supply Belgian forts 
with guns that might be used against Germany, it 
did not for that sake of keeping faith with its cus- 
tomers arm those forts efficiently. The private 
manufacturer in Germany, having no State depart- 
ment to compete with him, has made it his first 
object to increase German expenditure on arma- 
ments to the maximum. 

In England, on the other hand, the circumstances 
have been slightly different, and the policy of the 
ammunition firms has varied accordingly. Besides 
buying warships, guns, and the rest from private 
firms, the State has its own shipbuilding yards and 
factories, and before the South African War it was 
accustomed to provide by its own manufacture for 
its own needs to the extent of one-third, while 
purchasing from private firms to the extent of two- 
thirds. With this the private firms were not satis- 



ARMAMENTS 75 

fied. Even before the South African War broke out 
the great engineering firms of the country that 
enjoyed Government contracts determined upon a 
campaign against the Government factories; and 
the profits reahzed through the South African War 
sharpened them in this determination. 

The broad principles which had led to the adoption 
of the system in vogue had been the idea that, while 
it was convenient to utilize the resources of private 
firms, it was also necessary to maintain a system of 
Government manufacture in order that the Govern- 
ment might have a staff of experts capable of testing 
the quality of the private supplies, and also a means 
of checking the prices. The result of such checking 
has generally been kept a profound secret, but the 
people of Enfield succeeded in getting a Government 
inquiry into the cost of Government manufacture as 
compared with purchase. It was found that where 
the same articles were partly purchased and partly 
manufactured it was much cheaper to the nation to 
manufacture for itself. With regard to other things, 
such articles as were invariably supplied by private 
firms continually went up in price ; such articles as 
were regularly manufactured in a Government 
factory continually went down in cost. 

On the conclusion of the South African War a 
Departmental Committee was appointed, known as 
the Murray Committee, and, after consultation with 
private manufacturers, this Committee recommended 
that only the smallest possible nucleus of men should 
be retained in employment in the Government work- 
shops. At the time the report was published, after 



76 PEACE AND WAR IN EUROPE 

great reductions, there were 14,037 men so employed. 
The Chief Superintendent of Ordnance Factories 
reported that this number was not susceptible to any 
further reduction. Nevertheless, the Committee 
recommended that it be reduced to 10,600,* and that 
on the outbreak of war this 10,600 should be suddenly 
increased to 26,700. Those who were responsible 
for the internal working of these factories warned the 
Government that to increase suddenly the staff of the 
Ordnance Factories almost threefold would lead to 
a hopeless breakdown. Nevertheless, the Murray 
Committee and the War Office, under Lord (then 
Mr.) Haldane, resolved that it must be done, although 
they admitted that in the first all-important months 
of war the nation would have to rely, in the main, 
on the supplies from its own factories. When the 
War Office began to act on this report and discharge 
men wholesale, an outcry was made ; and the case of 
the operatives commanded so much sympathy that 
a further inquiry was ordered, and a Conference, con- 
sisting of Government officials, three Labour M.P.'s, 
and two Members of Parliament, representing the 
interests of the private manufacturers, further sifted 
the matter. They reported that there was no neces- 
sity for the discharges, as the men and the machinery 
could be utilized in various ways in the Government 
service, and they added the significant warning : " It 
will only he by utilizing the plant in this manner in peace- 
time that the country can look with any confidence to 
possess a body of workmen of sufficient number and suffi- 

* 8,000 in Woolwich Arsenal, 2,600 in Enfield. 



ARMAMENTS 77 

dent training as will make expansion in time of emergency 
possible^ without risk of failure from an excessive influx 
of strange and unskilled labour.'' 

In spite of this authoritative declaration, the 
Government persisted in the poHcy of reduction of 
the staff of the Ordnance factories. It similarly 
also continually increased the proportion of warships 
built by private firms as compared with those built 
in the national dockyards. No explanation of this 
policy has been vouchsafed. Every remonstrance 
was met with vague talk about "economy," in spite 
of the fact that Government manufacture is the more 
economical system, by baseless insinuations that the 
critics of the Government were actuated by political 
partisanship, and by misleading expressions of sym- 
pathy for the men discharged. 

So far as the general public was concerned, it was 
not found possible to make it understand that the 
question at issue was not whether a body of public 
servants should be thrown out of work, but whether 
the safety of the nation itself should be sacrificed to 
dividends. 

The Government itself offering no explanation of 
its policy, those who remonstrated had to find their 
own interpretation. The following explanations 
were offered : 

1. That the private firms, through the wide diffu- 
sion of the ownership of their shares, exercise great 
influence among Members of Parliament. 

2. That by giving specially favourable opportunities 
for investment to Government officials, they can 
influence them to the peril of the nation. 



78 PEACE AND WAR IN EUROPE 

3. It is pointed out that out of Woolwich Arsenal 
alone in two or three years some twenty men, 
occupying important positions, were taken into the 
service of private firms manufacturing munitions of 
war, receiving great increases in their emoluments. 
It is said that, in consequence, the members of the 
staff of the Government factories were induced to look 
upon their positions in the Government service as 
opportunities for making openings for themselves into 
much more profitable careers in private employment. 

4. It is said that certain of these firms contribute 
to party funds. 

Whether all or any of these statements explain 
the facts, it is obvious that they do not offer the 
slightest justification. 

On one particular occasion with regard to certain 
torpedoes detailed charges of a most serious character 
were made in the Woolwich Pioneer, and brought 
before the personal attention of the Prime Minister 
himself, and these statements have never been con- 
tradicted. 

The outbreak of war tested the policy of reduction 
to a mere nucleus of the men employed in the 
Ordnance factories, adopted by the Government on 
the recommendation of the Murray Committee. 
The expectation that had been held out that it would 
be possible immediately on the outbreak of the war 
to increase the number of men at work from 10,600 to 
26,700, was found utterly delusive. Out of the many 
obvious difficulties which one proved insurmount- 
able, we need not inquire ; it is sufficient that there 



ARMAMENTS 79 

was only a gradual increase, and the great immediate 
expansion of output from the Government's own 
factories, which was the basis of the Government's 
scheme for national defence, did not take place, 
though in course of time the numbers swelled to a 
much larger total than 26,700. 

For me it was no surprise in August to see so 
repeatedly in the reports of the retreat from Mons 
and the subsequent fighting those fatal words, " The 
great superiority of the enemy in quantity of artil- 
lery." How much we have had, and shall have, to 
pay for the Arsenal discharges of 1906 and 1907 in 
loss of men in the initial stages of the war, and still 
more through the prolongation of the war as a conse- 
quence of the August disasters, and what France and 
Belgium have had to pay through the occupation of 
their territories, it is impossible to say. I have no 
doubt that but for the crippling of the Royal Arsenal 
in 1907, at least the French and British armies would 
have been able to carry through successfully the 
scheme whereby it was hoped that Antwerp would 
have been saved and its defenders linked up with the 
main allied army. 

It is distasteful to have to deal with this sordid 
aspect of war, but it is necessary. It may be bad to 
wash dirty linen in public ; it is much worse not to 
wash it at all. It is very disquieting now to re- 
member that, in spite of Sir William Butler's efforts, 
only a poor pretence was made of dealing with the 
scandals of the South African War. The suspicion 
of fresh scandals, of enormous and unjustifiable 



8o PEACE AND WAR IN EUROPE 

profits made out of war contracts, is already exer- 
cising a very powerful influence on the minds of 
those manual workers on whose skill and strength 
the existence of the British Empire depends. If the 
Chancellor of the Exchequer were in a position to 
announce that there should be, when the war is over, 
if not before, an inquisition into the whole subject of 
war profits, and that all increase of profits made by 
any British company or individual as a consequence 
of the war, should be taxed 20s. in the £, he would 
achieve something for the country's finances, and 
much more for the avoidance of strikes during the 
war. The principle of the British Army is that if 
you want men to face danger, you must say to them, 
" Come," not " Go." The same applies to the facing 
of sacrifice. Shareholders of firms drawing big divi- 
dends from war-orders, and calling in the name of 
patriotism upon artisans and labourers to work over- 
time every day and Sundays, and to abstain from 
strikes in any circumstances whatever, supply a 
spectacle to which only the pencil of Will Dyson 
can do justice. 

It has been proposed that, in the making of peace, 
one of the objects sought should be the abolition in 
all countries of the private trade in munitions of war, 
and that this manufacture should in all countries be 
a Government monopoly. The facts, as far as I 
have been able to support them, indicate that that 
proposal should receive the support, not only of 
pacifists, but also of all Britons concerned for the 
safety of their own country. 



LECTURE V 

THE TERMS OF PEACE 

When war began, the prayers in our churches were 
for " a speedy, honourable, and lasting peace." 
Never in our time did prayers more truly interpret 
the aspiration of the people. There may be some 
variation in the emphasis which we lay on those three 
adjectives, but almost all thinking men will, I believe, 
agree in laying the greatest emphasis on the last. 
** We are not going to leave this for our children to 
have to do over again." And all over the country, 
wherever two or three people are met together dis- 
posed for serious talk, the discussion turns on this 
question, How can we make peace permanent ? Shall 
endless wars still more wars breed ? 

Because war tends to breed war, because it rarely 
settles old issues without raising new ones which 
equally bear the seeds of conflict, this discussion 
must turn in the first place upon the problem of 
making such a peace as to leave the fewest and 
smallest possible provocations to renewed inter- 
national antagonisms ; and in the second place to 
the measures to be taken in subsequent years. 
Neither of these problems do I propose to consider 
from all possible or actual standpoints. I shall 

8i II 



82 PEACE AND WAR IN EUROPE 

ignore entirely what to my mind is the insane view 
that war is in itself desirable, and the foolishly 
pessimistic view that war, though undesirable, is an 
evil that can never be got rid of. I shall also assume, 
what seems to me to be clearly proved, that the 
British, French, and Russian Governments were each 
and all honestly and keenly desirous of preventing 
war, and that they were defeated in their efforts to 
maintain peace by the determination of the German 
Government that war should take place. There are 
some who admit this, and yet contend, like Tolstoi, 
that war can be ended, and can only be ended, by 
refusing to fight, and that German aggression should 
have been met, after the example of Ivan the Fool, 
by non-resistance. Apart from the question as to 
whether that is possible, human nature being what 
it is, past experience shows that the result of sub- 
mission to Prussia has been that the State that has 
submitted has been put through the mill of Prussian 
organization and education and refashioned into a 
new engine for further aggression. To wage this 
war with determination in order to secure, if possible, 
a very complete victory, appears to me to be the 
clear duty of the Allies, terrible as may be the sacri- 
fices entailed. 

It has been urged in some quarters that there 
should be no humiliation of Germany. That we 
should love our enemies is not only the noblest, but 
also the wisest, advice that can be proffered to 
nations at war, just as much as to private persons 
entangled in antagonisms. Unless we love our 



THE TERMS OF PEACE 83 

enemies, and sympathetically try to realize the whole 
situation from their point of view, we shall fail to 
understand them, and shall miscalculate both their 
strength and their weakness. But it does not follow 
that we should attempt to stifle the feeling of 
righteous indignation at monstrous wrong ; and one 
wonders whether this talk of not humiliating Ger- 
many does not spring from a failure to apply the 
same principle of imaginative sympathy with Ger- 
many's victims. But I do not wish to criticize the 
sentiment behind this attitude, only to examine it in 
cold blood from the point of view of the permanence 
of peace. 

Up to the outbreak of this war all efforts towards 
securing peace or mitigating the horrors of war, 
whether by Hague Conventions, or arbitr^ion 
treaties, or neutrality arrangements, or in any other 
way whatsoever, have been based upon the assump- 
tion of the sanctity of treaties. This was necessarily 
so ; and, when the war is over, there will be no 
possibility of building up an organization for peace 
which does not depend on that same assumption. 
But Germany, having resolved on this war, merely 
for the sake of greater convenience in carrying it on, 
tore up the most sacred treaties, and did so on the 
ground that no treaty by which she had bound her- 
self would count for anything with her if it stood in 
the way of those ambitions which she chooses to call 
** necessity." The indispensable preliminary, there- 
fore, to any peace policy must be the vindication of 
the sanctity of treaties. Had the United States and 



84 PEACE AND WAR IN EUROPE 

other neutral nations seen their way to protest, and 
protest effectively, against the invasion of Belgium, a 
great forward stride would have been made. But, as 
a matter of fact, they made no protest, effective or 
otherwise ; therefore the burden rests upon the Allies. 
It is now compulsory on them, in their own interest, 
in the interest of the whole of humanity, not excluding 
Germany, to see that, if they can possibly achieve it, 
the results of that chapter of events which opened 
with the violation of Belgian neutrality shall be a 
renewed and increased binding force in treaty obliga- 
tions. That object cannot be achieved without 
bringing Germany into an attitude of repentance — 
repentance, that is, of the only sort that can be 
imposed on from without, a conviction that wrong- 
doing does not pay — but it must be a very deep and 
lasting repentance of that particular type. A better 
sort may then follow later, for German philosophy 
has always been ready to interpret the lessons of 
German experience into ethical maxims, good and 
bad. Now it is utterly inconceivable that terms of 
peace can be drawn up which should produce this 
repentance, which Germany will not feel to be 
humiliating in an extreme degree. 

It is, of course, premature at this period to assume 
that the Allies will be able to inflict a sufficiently 
complete defeat of Germany by force of arms. Some 
people think that we shall never succeed in driving 
the Germans out of Belgium, but shall have to get 
them out by bargaining — offering, perhaps, the 
return of conquered German colonies. A nominal 



THE TERMS OF PEACE 85 

peace of this sort would be no real peace, and the 
choice of policies before the Allies would be between 
different ways of continuing- the struggle. We might 
return to the old method of competition in arma- 
ments, but henceforward with our eyes open, and 
acting in definite co-operation, and hoping, by 
simultaneously developing the immense resources of 
the allied dominions, to establish so great a pre- 
ponderance of strength as to achieve ultimately by 
diplomatic pressure the essential objects for which 
we are at war — to compel the disarmament of 
Germany, and then to disarm ourselves ; or we 
might proceed along the lines of the policy recom- 
mended by Mr. H. G. Wells, and, while nominally 
making peace, continue the struggle as a tariff war, 
forming a Customs Union with our Allies, and levy- 
ing heavy duties on every import from Germany. 
Neither of these alternatives is pleasant to contem- 
plate, but in the situation under consideration it 
would be necessary to face unpleasantness. It 
would have arisen through our failure to defeat 
Germany, and we should have to accept the conse- 
quences of that failure. 

In such circumstances, the proposal of a tariff w^ar 
would demand very careful consideration. It would 
presumably take the form of an agreement between 
the British Empire, Russia, France, Belgium, and 
Serbia for either absolutely free trade within the 
boundaries of this alliance, or for very light duties 
on each other's goods, a considerable uniform tariff 
on all goods imported from neutral countries, and a 



86 PEACE AND WAR IN EUROPE 

very much higher tariff on goods imported from 
Germany and Austria. There might also be taxes 
on exports to Germany and Austria of goods in 
which the aUied countries have more or less a virtual 
monopoly. Thus Russia could tax the export of 
rye to Germany, and the British Empire the export 
of wool. Further, efforts would be made to induce 
neutral countries, particularly European neutral 
countries, to join the alliance, whereupon they also 
would impose the penal tariff on German goods, and 
get the benefit of free trade with the Allies. The 
underlying principle would have to be carried out 
along other lines also. British and French capital 
would have to be used freely for the reconstruction, 
in the first place, of Belgium and North-East 
France, and then for the organization of cheap 
and rapid communications between all the allied 
dominions. The ancient sea-route by Archangel, 
for example, would have to be developed, the 
Russian railway systems — European, Siberian, trans- 
Caspian, and trans-Caucasian — linked up with those 
of India by way of the Persian Gulf, and the Channel 
Tunnel constructed. Further, the study of the 
French and Russian languages would have to be 
fostered, and all unnecessary barriers to inter- 
communication swept away. 

It is easy to see that the passing and enforcing of 
the Tariff would be attended with great difficulties. 
The mere fact that it would favour many important 
industries and injure others would lead to internal 
strife. Then there are the more or less divergent 



THE TERMS OF PEACE 87 

interests of the several allied countries. The enemy 
would not be idle, and would make full use of the 
many opportunities that would occur of aggravating 
discord. In neutral countries, the struggle between 
the Allies on one hand, and the Germanic powers 
on the other, would lead to very ugly developments. 
Imagine, for example, the position of Holland or 
Denmark, called upon to cut commercial connections 
either with Germany or with Britain, France, and 
Belgium. But war is always difficult and ugly and 
disastrous. The question is not whether tariff war 
is to be preferred to peace, but whether, in the 
event of real peace not being attainable, tariff war is 
not better than war carried on by slaughter. As 
long as that was really the alternative, and the fact 
that it was so was kept in mind, the difficulties 
should be surmountable, and the enormous pre- 
ponderance in area, population, and natural resources 
of the allied Powers should put the result out of 
doubt. The result would involve the relative, not 
the absolute, impoverishment of Germany. 

Let us now turn to the alternate hypothesis, and 
consider, if the result of the war is that the Allies are 
able to impose their own conditions of peace, what 
terms would be most favourable to the avoidance of 
future wars. 

I. Indemnity. — The possibility of peace depending 
greatly on the question whether nations are prepared 
to govern their actions by considerations of justice, 
it is clear that the Allies should vindicate the purity 



88 PEACE AND WAR IN EUROPE 

of their motives by refusing to follow the precedent 
set by Germany in 1871, and decline to make any 
profit out of the war. On the other hand, they are 
bound to seek the fullest obtainable compensation 
for the wrongs actually inflicted on the people of 
Belgium, France, Poland, and Serbia in districts 
occupied by the enemy. That is the minimum 
indemnity with which they have any right to be 
satisfied. The maximum indemnity which they 
might justly demand obviously includes the full 
costs of the war, and even for France a return of 
the £240,000,000 exacted in 187 1, with compound 
interest up to date. Reckoning the interest at 4 per 
cent, per annum, this would approximately multiply 
the original total eightfold. To what extent it would 
be wise to abate the maximum demand, and treat 
the Germanic empires with generosity, it is, of 
course, impossible to discuss here. 

If our Government exacts, as it is fully entitled to, 
the full cost of the war, then all the German colonies 
which fall into our hands must be returned. But if, 
in view of the feelings of South Africa and Australia 
with regard to German neighbours, it is considered 
necessary to retain any of these, those retained might 
be valued on an equitable basis — possibly the total 
expenditure sunk in them by the German Govern- 
ment—and paid for by a reduction from the indemnity. 

The view has been expressed that at the end of 
the war Germany will not be in a position to pay 
any very great sum. This is a mistake. Germany, 
when war broke out, was enormously rich and rapidly 



THE TERMS OF PEACE 89 

growing in wealth, and practically free of debt, as 
the Imperial and State railways and other assets 
yielded a clear net income far in excess of the interest 
on Governmental debts. From the point of view of 
private citizens Germany was both a debtor and a 
creditor country, using foreign capital to a consider- 
able extent, but also owning vast foreign investments, 
and here also the balance was greatly in her favour. 
If Germany chose to cease her military and naval 
expenditure, she could pay an indemnity of two thou- 
sand millions sterling without being a penny worse 
off. As to how much she could pay without be- 
coming seriously impoverished, without, for example, 
being reduced to the average economic status of the 
British Empire, a correct calculation w^ould un- 
doubtedly run into enormous figures. It is obviously 
an understatement to say that Germany's power of 
production is ten times as great as that of the United 
Kingdom after Waterloo. Yet our National Debt 
was then close on ^£"900,000,000, and that did not 
cripple the national energies, nor stop the rapid 
increase in population and industrial efficiency. The 
inference is obvious. 

2. Rectification of Boundaries. — The whole argu- 
ment in Lecture III., if it is worth anything, goes to 
show that the guiding principle in the Congress of 
Powers, which will have to redraw the map of 
Europe, ought to be Nationality. This is the prin- 
ciple advocated by the '* Union for Democratic 
Control," which is very actively promoting the dis- 
cussion of the lines of the settlement. It is obvious 

12 



go PEACE AND WAR IN EUROPE 

that the reality of peace and the permanence of 
peace must depend on people being reasonably well 
satisfied with the Government they have, and they 
cannot be satisfied with a system of government that 
runs entirely counter to their national aspirations. 
The particular way in which the said union proposes 
to apply the principle — namely, by a plebiscite — is 
open to very serious objections. There are regions 
of Europe where, if such an arrangement were 
announced, in a district where there was something 
like an equality of numbers, the rival nationalities 
would not stop short of wholesale murder to secure 
the verdict. It is possible, however, that the 
plebiscite method might be applied to Alsace and 
Lorraine. 

In Germany, apart from Alsace and Lorraine, the 
two outstanding questions are Schleswig-Holstein 
and Poland. It is only the northern part of Holstein 
that is Danish in language, and the practical question 
to settle would be whether it would be best to draw 
the new frontier according to the present language 
boundary — that is, westwards from the Flensborg to 
the North Sea, or at, or even beyond, the Kiel Canal. 
The latter policy has obvious attractions, but if there 
is reason to suppose that the German population 
thus handed over to Danish rule would resent the 
change, Denmark would probably be wise enough to 
reject so dangerous a gift. 

Russia has already announced her policy of 
creating a united and autonomous Poland, and pre- 
sumably has done so with British and French assent. 



THE TERMS OF PEACE 91 

Exactly how the boundaries should be drawn is, 
however, a question of great difficulty. Before 
Frederick the Great carried out the first partition, 
Poland stretched to the Baltic Sea, including the 
lower basin of the Vistula, now called West Prussia, 
and the city of Dantzig. To include this area would 
be to make future trouble through the fact that the 
district has now a predominantly German popula- 
tion ; on the other hand, not to give the new 
dominion an outlet to the sea would generate dis- 
content on economic grounds. Perhaps, as the 
Vistula is a great and not a rapid river, the problem 
could be solved by improving its navigation, so that 
a port capable of receiving ocean-going ships could 
be created on Polish soil, and neutralizing the river 
thence to its mouth. 

The changes in the German frontier here discussed 
are comparatively slight, for the historical reason 
that the German Empire was built up on the principle 
of nationality. But when we turn to Austria- 
Hungary, based on the dynastic principle, and the 
denial of nationality, the transformation indicated 
by the national principle is extraordinary. A redis- 
tribution according to supposed racial affinities would 
add part of Galicia to Poland, and part to Little 
Russia ; Bukowina, Transylvania, and considerable 
parts of Hungary to Roumania ; the Trentino, 
Trieste, and neighbouring districts to Italy ; and 
would assign to Serbia not only Bosnia and Herze- 
govina, but Slavonia, Croatia, and most of Dalmatia, 
the rest going to Italy. Then there w^ould still be 



92 PEACE AND WAR IN EUROPE 

the problem of the Slav populations of Bohemia, 
Moravia, and the adjoining portion of Hungary, 
numbering some eight millions, and forming a pretty 
compact mass in spite of numerous German villages 
and a large German and Jewish population in the 
towns. An independent Greater Bohemia does not 
as yet seem to be contemplated even among the 
Czechs; but as they are in numbers not very inferior 
either to the Magyars or to the Austrian-Germans, 
and have powerful organizations, they may demand 
autonomy and an equal status, and thus convert the 
dual into a triple monarchy. Subsequently, one is 
left to speculate what might be the influence on them 
of an autonomous Poland, with its kindred language, 
touching them on their eastern frontier. 

Even this hasty sketch is sufficient to show how 
complicated must be the problem of straightening 
out the Austrian tangle on Nationalist Hues ; and I 
have left unmentioned the difficulties springing from 
the lack of any clearness or simplicity in the racial 
and language frontiers. For example, however sin- 
cere and unbiassed the desire to draw the boundary 
correctly between Hungary and Roumania, it would 
be impossible to avoid leaving both Magyars and 
Roumanians in considerable numbers on the wrong 
side. There is also, in the case of the Serb popula- 
tions, the additional difficulty of religious differences ; 
and it is very doubtful whether, if they were given the 
choice, the Roman Catholic section would not prefer 
to remain under Austria, rather than united with 
their kin of the Eastern Church. 

Similar difficulties, greatly intensified, lie before 



THE TERMS OF PEACE 93 

the Congress of the Powers which would attempt to 
deal with Turkey on the hues of nationality. The 
islands, including Cyprus, might, without any diffi- 
culty arising from the nature of things, pass to 
Greece. But Smyrna also is Greek, and much of 
the shore of Asia Minor ; and Smyrna is also the 
port for a great hinterland, of which the population 
is Mohammedan and largely Turkish. If Smyrna 
be ceded to Greece, it would be extraordinarily diffi- 
cult to fix on a satisfactory frontier. The success of 
Jewish colonization in Palestine ought to secure the 
opportunity for the creation of an autonomous Jewish 
State, which might gradually extend to the limits of 
Solomon's kingdom ; but for the rest of the vast 
Empire there seems no possibility of forming separate 
States of Arabs, Turks, Armenians, Kurds, and the 
rest, capable either of decent internal administration, 
or of keeping the peace with one another. The rule 
of the foreigner seems the only possible solution. If 
there were any chance that the suggestion would be 
listened to, I should like to urge government by a 
Commission, the Chief Commissioner appointing his 
colleagues, and himself appointed by the President of 
the United States ; this being the nearest possible 
approach to these newly-evolved American forms of 
government which have yielded the most brilliant 
results. 

But I must urge, however fruitlessly, that a con- 
sideration that is only too likely to be altogether for- 
gotten ought to be the guiding idea in the settlement 
of the Turkish Empire. These lands, together with 
Greece, parts of Italy, and Egypt, are the sites of the 



94 PEACE AND WAR IN EUROPE 

most difficult, because the earliest, inventions ; of 
man's greatest achievements in husbandry, in re- 
ligious thought, until recently, in science ; of great 
achievement also in arts of various kinds. The 
oppressed and impoverished descendants of those 
thinkers and inventors to whom the world owes an 
incalculable debt still remain, few in numbers, indeed, 
scattered and intermixed with intellectually sterile 
races. The seed is there ; given the opportunity for 
growth it will spring up again, if we can trust the cur- 
rent teaching of modern biology. The ancient civili- 
zation of Greece which produced the art of Knossus 
and of Mycenae was trampled down for centuries by 
foreign conquest, but the innate capacity of the people 
was handed down from generation to generation, to 
burst forth again in the Athens of Pericles. Greece lay 
again for centuries under the heel of the barbarian, 
and to those who, for the memories of her past, 
worked for her restoration, there was continual dis- 
appointment. " Degenerate " was the word con- 
tinually used to describe the modern Greek, and even 
fantastic theories were launched that they were not 
descendants of the true Hellenes. Yet at last Greece 
has not only found, but has been able to follow 
unitedly, a statesman of her blood of the calibre of 
Pericles, and show in the field of battle a valour and 
an efficiency which would have done credit to her 
great days. It may well be hoped that in art and 
literature and science also the proof of Greek re- 
nascence will come, before not much more than a 
hundred years has elapsed since the first partial re- 



THE TERMS OF PEACE 95 

covery of independence. Much longer will neces- 
sarily be the period before there can be a renascent 
Phoenicia or Babylon or Colchis or Lydia ; but that 
these also should come in due time is of greater 
moment to humanity than that the mineral wealth of 
Anatolia should be exploited by this or that group of 
financiers, or that this or that aggregation of factories 
should find a market for the products of its machines 
and machine-driven hands among the peasantry of 
Mesopotamia. Unfortunately the sort of realism in 
politics which endeavours to ascertain real values and 
secure them for humanity is not yet dominant. 

The immense difficulty and complexity of the 
problems that will arise through the pretty complete 
liquidation of the Turkish Empire, and the more 
partial liquidation of Austria-Hungary, almost makes 
inconceivable any idea that they can be finally dealt 
with in the meeting of ambassadors which will 
arrange terms of peace. Another method of inter- 
national action will have to be established, and to 
the discussion of that problem I shall return later. 

3. Securities for the Future. — Again, assuming that 
peace is won by the victory of the Allies, and by a 
victory so complete that for a while Germany lies in 
their hands, what sort of precautions shall be taken 
against a war of revenge ? On this point we have 
many opinions expressed of a most diverse character. 

What we may call the moderate school would 
neutralize the Kiel Canal, and take back Heligoland, 
and trust to a revulsion of opinion as the result of 
the experience of the war, which would overthrow 



96 PEACE AND WAR IN EUROPE 

militarism in Germany and restore her to a proud 
and honourable place in the comity of nations. 
They consider that we can do practically nothing to 
assist such a change of opinion in Germany, but that 
it will probably come by the natural workings of the 
German mind. Many people who have intimate 
relations with Germany hold this opinion ; and 
others who lay great stress upon the steady increase 
of the Socialist vote. There are others, including 
our militarists, and also Mr. H. G. Wells, who, 
while equally thinking that the German attitude of 
mind is outside our control, are altogether pessimistic 
about a victory for pacific forces in Germany, and 
look forward to an indefinitely prolonged period 
during which she will be gathering her forces for a 
renewal of the struggle. Universal military service 
and a continually expanding Navy are assumed to be 
necessary by the former group ; while Mr. Wells 
recommends the Tariff war discussed above. 

The first question, therefore, is whether we are 
justified in taking an optimistic view with regard to 
the future determination of Germany to live on good 
terms with her neighbours. This is at least doubtful. 
Enghsh people who have made friends in Germany 
have naturally in most cases come chiefly into con- 
tact with the section of opinion most disposed to be 
friendly to England, and are in danger of over- 
estimating the numbers and weight of that section. 
As to the growth of the Socialist vote, it proves 
nothing. It is true that it has been swollen very 
largely by the support of opponents to the ever- 



THE TERMS OF PEACE 97 

increasing armaments and the aggressive and pro- 
vocative foreign policy of the Government, but there 
is no indication that the number of these pacific 
voters was increasing, but only that to an increasing 
extent they were driven into voting for the Socialist 
party, because it was the only genuine anti-Govern- 
ment party. The fact that all the other parties were 
becoming more and more united in their support of 
despotism at home and war abroad, combined with 
the increasing timidity of the Socialists, completely 
negative any favourable inferences which might be 
drawn from the increase of the Socialist vote. 

Is it, however, beyond doubt that we must con- 
sider it impossible to influence German opinion ? 

Of policies based upon the opposite idea there 
are three that I know of. The first is that of the 
No Humiliation school. These desire that the war 
should end in a draw rather than in victory. The 
more extreme of them would confirm Germany in 
the possession of Alsace and Lorraine and all her 
other dominions, would veto the unification of 
Poland, inflict no indemnity, and even in the more 
extreme cases propose that Great Britain should 
bear the cost of restoring Belgium once more to 
prosperity. They hope that such touching magna- 
nimity would melt the hearts of the German General 
Staff. It is a view about which it is impossible to 
argue. Those who hold it would also perhaps 
apply a similar view to cases of individuals, and put 
convicted burglars in positions of trust. They are, 
fortunately perhaps, in the minority. 

13 



98 PEACE AND WAR IN EUROPE 

Quite early in the course of the war the idea was 
suggested, which I, for one, welcomed with great 
hopefulness, that the German Empire might be split 
into its constituent states and the Kingdom of 
Prussia subdivided, and each fragment be given a 
completely democratic constitution, with full liberty 
to all subsequently to confederate and form any sort 
of union they chose, except that of a HohenzoUern 
Empire. I regret to say that I have ceased to regard 
this as possible. The work of unification on the 
existing lines appears, from the accounts received of 
the state of feeling in various parts of Germany, to 
have been done too thoroughly. 

A similar idea is urged by Mr. Charles E. Innes. 
" Destroy the present form of Germany, root and 
branch, and grant to the German nation a demo- 
cratic form of government, with the sovereign power 
and responsibility vested in the people," with the 
condition: "That it shall join with the AlHes, and 
participate in a defensive alliance against any and 
every aggressive nation from now henceforth, and it 
shall disown any intention of self-aggrandizement at 
the expense of any other nation." 

With regard to the suggested condition, it seems 
to me that it would either be superfluous or futile ; 
superfluous if a democratized Germany ceases to be 
aggressive, futile if it does not. The main proposition 
can be discussed quite apart from this addendum. 
It can be taken as a possible interpretation of 
Mr. Asquith's inspiring, but somewhat cryptic, declara- 
tion : " We shall not sheathe the sword . . . until 



THE TERMS OF PEACE 99 

the military domination of Prussia is wholly and 
finally destroyed." Necessarily that cannot be done 
unless it is destroyed in Germany, even in Prussia 
itself; it can only be destroyed by being superseded, 
and the only supersession we could contemplate 
would be supersession by democracy. Yet whether 
we should not too greatly compromise democracy in 
Germany by forcing it upon the nation from without, 
is a question on which the most serious doubts must 
arise. The Allies would have to invite the help of 
the Socialist party, and request German democrats 
to take up the task of working out the plan of the 
democratic constitution. If they refused, the diffi- 
culty would be greatly increased ; if they responded, 
they might make themselves the mark for bitter 
attacks and the accusation of aiding the country's 
enemies. If, however, by the time peace is made 
there is a great revulsion of feeling, and a democratic 
constitution is desired by the majority of the people, 
the Allies might break down the obstacles to a free 
choice by the people of their future system of govern- 
ment. To take such a step would be in harmony 
with the declarations frequently made, that we are at 
war not with Germany, but with German militarism. 
But the result, good or bad, would have to be 
accepted in good faith. 

We have, lastly, the view of the man in the street 
— that when the war is over responsibility for making 
the war shall be brought home to its authors, and 
that fitting punishment shall be imposed on them 
personally, however highly placed ; and that where 



100 PEACE AND WAR IN EUROPE 

the guilt of violations of the Conventions of War is 
traced home to the actual perpetrators or to those 
who gave the orders, the guilty persons shall be 
justly dealt with. Personally, I wish it might be so, 
and I can imagine no more salutary action. But I 
do not expect in my time to see Emperors and 
Ministers and Generals made to pay the penalty of 
their crimes, like ordinary citizens, any more than I 
expect to see the lord who steals the common from 
the goose serve his term with the vagabond who 
steals the goose from the common. 

I conclude, therefore, that the best guarantee 
against a war of revenge will be a continuance of the 
present Alliance, with the addition of such Powers, 
at present neutral, as may seek admission, and 
towards Germany a policy of justice, tempered, not 
overpowered, by mercy — peace being preceded by a 
victory so complete that the HohenzoUern dynasty 
and the existing system of government may be 
seriously discredited, and the delusion of German 
invincibility destroyed. 



LECTURE VI 

THE FUTURE MAINTENANCE OF PEACE 

" A dog starved at his master's gate 
Predicts the ruin of the State." 

Having thus attempted a wide, though cursory, 
review of the perspective of past wars, and some 
examination of the problems of the present crisis, 
have we, as a result, obtained any new light or wider 
vision of the possibilities of building up international 
peace, and of the essential elements of the right 
policy to that end ? I think we have. 

On the balance of force for peace or war, we have 
this main conclusion : that while war breeds war, so 
that the period after the termination of a war, from 
the time that there is some recovery from the ex- 
haustion, and while still the angry feelings and the 
irritation from new conditions imposed by the peace 
are unabated, is the period of maximum peril, yet 
from the point of view of the general evolution of 
society the forces for peace are continually growing. 
Though States widen their boundaries, yet the geo- 
graphical radius of any individual person's interests 
extends far more rapidly. Less and less can any 
nation preserve an independent economic life. In the 
very elementary function of feeding and clothing its 

lOI 



102 PEACE AND WAR IN EUROPE 

population, it is part of one world-wide system of 
production, transport, and exchange. It is the same 
with regard to the higher activities of man. It was 
more or less reasonable for Euripides to talk about 
Hellenic culture in contrast with foreign barbarism. 
To adopt a similar attitude to-day, and to talk about 
British or French or German culture is to talk about 
what does not exist. In reality, there is nothing more 
than British, French, and German contributions to a 
common world-culture, and British, French, and 
German assimilations from the common stock. And 
while each nation may take an honourable pride in 
its own contributions, when it examines them it can- 
not find any which are exclusively its own, for each 
worker starts from results already achieved, which 
men of all nations have helped to attain. The active- 
minded citizen of any advanced nation can no longer 
be thought of in terms of his relation to his city and 
to his nation merely. All round him there are 
organizations — religious, economic, scientific, pro- 
pagandist — which appeal to him to link himself with 
others in many countries who share with him some 
particular common interest. This is not only the 
case with the '* intellectuals." Trade-unionism is 
rapidly becoming more and more international, so is 
co-operation. Free libraries make the writings of 
the most famous authors of the world accessible to 
very humble readers. Certain difficulties in carrying 
on the war against which many people have chafed ; 
the enormous number of ''enemy aliens" in each 
belligerent, and in all the more important neutral 



FUTURE MAINTENANCE OF PEACE 103 

countries ; the awkwardness to Governments of the 
problem of dealing with them ; the great number of 
men, and still more of wives, whose real nationality, 
as determined by their sympathies, it is impossible to 
ascertain — all these illustrate the cardinal fact that 
a social organization of human beings is proceeding, 
which ignores State frontiers, and which is entirely 
out of harmony with international war. The out- 
break of war violently severs or strains millions of 
personal bonds between individuals — which should 
enable us to realize that those personal bonds were 
there, and that they have been rapidly multiplying 
and growing stronger. 

If we take the results of our examination on the 
other side — the state of the forces making for war, 
grouped under the four heads of Economic, Religious, 
Political, and Sociological— we find the outlook on the 
whole encouraging and reassuring. Hunger wars, 
wars springing from biological necessity for Europe 
and Asia, were ended by the Russian conquest of the 
Steppes of Tartary ; and though there are groups of 
capitalists and financers who can make profits out of 
wars, and out of Imperialistic adventures which may 
lead to wars, such profits are insignificant compared 
with the losses that fall upon the whole body of the 
owners of the world's accumulated stores of wealth. 
In the field of religion, the centuries of wars of the 
Cross and the Crescent are almost to their end ; and 
the balance of the power of ethical appeal for peace 
over that for war is increasing more rapidly than at 
any previous time in the world's history. There re- 



104 PEACE AND WAR IN EUROPE 

main the political conflicts of rival nationalities and 
empires — what we may call the stupid egotisms of 
corporate personalities of the political order ; and 
also the sinister power wielded by the very organiza- 
tions which nations have created for their defence, 
but which are necessarily offensive as well as defen- 
sive. On this side the force making for war is as 
great or greater than ever. Nevertheless, taking the 
process of social evolution as a whole, the pacific 
force is relatively strengthening, the war force 
w^eakening. 

Translating this estimate of the general situation 
into terms of policy, we have the three following 
lines of action indicated : 

1. Time being on the side of peace, and the forces 
for peace in most countries, if only they were oyganized, 
being more powerful than those for war, at the worst 
it is always worth while to struggle for the postpone- 
ment of an " inevitable " war. 

2. But the main struggle must be to create an 
international morality, and to 

3. Win for society as a whole the power of con- 
trolling its belligerent organs. 

I. The Postponement of War. — As I write, exactly a 
hundred years have passed since the day of Napo- 
leon's return from Elba, which was followed within 
a few weeks by Waterloo. How many times during 
that hundred years has not war between Britain and 
France been ** inevitable " ? Our Volunteers were 
organized to meet a French invasion ; our forts in the 
South of England w^ere built for that purpose ; for 



FUTURE MAINTENANCE OF PEACE 105 

the greater part of the hundred years it was against 
France that we built our Navy ; but, in spite of Siam 
and Fashodaand many forgotten issues, the " inevit- 
able " war has been postponed with such success that 
it has ceased to be '* inevitable," and to-day is 
nothing more than an ugly and improbable night- 
mare. The value of postponement was the guiding 
principle with Sir Edward Grey in his negotiations 
for the averting of the present war, and it was also 
fully understood by those who made the war. They 
hurried forward the crisis with all possible speed for 
that very reason. The United States has recognized 
the same fact in its last series of arbitration treaties 
characterized by " the cooling-off clause." 

2. International Morality , — I have previously alluded 
to the doctrine that there is no place for morality in 
international relations, that there is nothing above 
the State, and that each State has the right to pursue 
its own aggrandizement irrespective of the rights or 
interests of others and regardless of its own plighted 
word. I do not wish to enter into any philosophic 
argument on the theory; intellectually, the mere fact 
that no State can live a separate life seems to me to 
demonstrate its absurdity. What I am concerned 
with is the tendency, growing or disappearing, of 
States to act upon it. 

We have to recognize that, as a matter of fact, the 
prevailing level of morality of State action in inter- 
national relations is appallingly low. Our own record 
for the past sixty years includes the Crimean War, 
Chinese opium wars, Afghan and Zulu Wars, the 

14 



io6 PEACE AND WAR IN EUROPE 

bombardment of Alexandria, the Soudan War, the 
South African War. There are, of course, varying 
opinions about each of these ; there is one, but only 
one, of them which I personally should be pre- 
pared to defend before an international audience. 
Nor has our inaction been much more honourable 
than our action. We deserted Denmark in 1864 ; 
we made no efforts to mitigate the conditions 
imposed by Prussia on France in 1871 ; our sup- 
port of the Turkish tyranny was shortsighted and 
cynical ; and our efforts to secure the execution of 
reforms in Macedonia and Armenia timid in the 
extreme — and so on. To foreign observers the pro- 
fessions that were uniformly made that we were 
acting from the highest motives, out of respect for 
treaties, from necessary self-defence, desire for peace, 
or for the general well-being of humanity, must seem 
like the most odious hypocrisies, designed to serve 
selfish ends by deceiving those whom it was our 
supposed interest to outwit. But in reality it was 
not so. To a certain extent all these alleged motives 
were real factors, though perhaps lamentably feeble 
ones, in the make-up of British policy ; and, to the 
extent that they were hypocritical, they were de- 
signed to deceive our own people, who did desire that 
the conduct of the State towards other nations should he 
justy honourable, and humane. 

Now, whether the British Empire, as a State, has 
in its international relations behaved better or worse 
than the average of contemporary States, all circum- 
stances being taken into consideration, must be left 



FUTURE MAINTENANCE OF PEACE 107 

to the judgment of historians of the distant future. 
But what is true of our record is generally true of 
theirs also. The binding power of any higher 
morality when in direct conflict with what is sup- 
posed to be the interest of the State has been small, 
but very rarely has it appeared non-existent. And it 
is clear that in the judgment of humanity to-day, 
when a nation openly declares its complete repudia- 
tion of moral obligations to the rest of the world, it 
is regarded as suffering from a sort of collective 
insanity. The result is that the State so suffering 
morally is doomed also to suffer materially. 

Now, this is true in a special degree for the British 
Empire. If we never realized this before we ought 
to realize it now. The very right of the Empire 
to exist has been rudely challenged. When we can 
look back and carefully review the progress of events, 
we shall see by what a narrow margin it has been 
saved, and that it owes its continued existence not 
only to the might of the Fleet, to the valour of the 
Army, and the success of the action taken by the 
Government, but primarily to the verdict pronounced 
upon it by neutral nations and by subject nation- 
alities within the Empire. Germany disregarded 
Sir Edward Grey's warnings because she believed 
that, when challenged, the British Empire would 
crumble into dust. She believed that there would 
be civil war in Ireland, a widespread rebellion in 
India, a rally to the Holy War for Islam in Egypt, 
a practically unanimous rising of the Boers in 
Africa, and a cutting of the painter by Canada and 



io8 PEACE AND WAR IN EUROPE 

Australia. She believed, also, that neutral nations 
would desire to see the supremacy of the sea pass 
from Britain. In all these hopes she was dis- 
appointed. But they were not all unreasonable or 
improbable hopes, and if any one had been realized 
the balance of force in the great struggle would 
have been altered incalculably. And in some of 
these quarters a very slight transfer of opinion from 
our favour to our disfavour would have turned the 
scale. The world has given its verdict in favour of 
the continued existence of the British Empire, but 
not in too enthusiastic terms. We might read it as 
saying, " Better Britain than Germany, however bad 
Britain may be " ; or, at best, ** This and better 
may do." 

We have, in fact, to make up our minds that 
justice, understanding, and sympathy must be the 
very lifeblood of the Empire. In order that there 
may be strength at the centre, in these islands we 
must have more economic and social justice between 
classes and between the sexes, otherwise there will 
be growing disunion and, all too probably, a pro- 
gressive decay in the very physical vitality of our 
people. There must be more justice, in particular, 
for the peoples of India ; and, in order that there 
may be justice, a much more effective understanding 
of Indian problems. Signs of marked progress in 
this direction one has been glad to notice in recent 
years. Lastly, the principle of justice must be much 
more keenly pursued in our relations with those 
nations whose strength is negligible compared with 



FUTURE MAINTENANCE OF PEACE 109 

our own. Though for very existence the British 
Empire must adopt justice as a policy, it will not 
suffice that it should do so only from prudential 
motives. In that case, at every crisis shortsighted 
views of what was prudent would prevail. There 
must be a deliberate training of those who are to 
exercise authority in the love of justice and fair 
play, and the obvious place for this training is in the 
school and the playing-field. 

The example of the British Empire, when guided 
by a clearly grasped truth, is likely, after the con- 
clusion of the present war, to exercise a dominating 
influence over Russian policy, and we can see very 
easily what a relief to international strain and 
general appeasement of the human mind would 
result from a resolve of the Czar's Government to 
treat with justice and understanding and sympathy 
Finland, Poland, and Persia, not forgetting the 
Russian peasant and workman. The effect of British 
example will be enhanced if the policy be continued — 
a policy which seems in itself prudent and natural — 
of continuing to knit more closely the Anglo- Franco- 
Russian Entente. Judging from Sir Edward Grey's 
declaration in 1913 that, while welcoming new 
friendships, he would not sacrifice old ones to get 
them, this is likely to be the policy of the immediate 
future. Oxford University might well assist by 
arranging for Rhodes scholarships to be held in 
future by Russian instead of German students. 
Further, all those measures of economic co-opera- 
tion suggested above in connection with Mr. Wells's 



no PEACE AND WAR IN EUROPE 

Tariff war proposal form a natural supplement to 
that diplomatic policy. 

It is, however, necessary that Sir Edward Grey's 
declaration should be read backwards as well — that 
while holding fast to existing friendships we also 
welcome new ones. It being clearly understood 
that the Triple Entente is to persist, we must aim at 
a wider understanding. 

One of the ideas that has been brought forward, 
and has been very earnestly discussed in many 
circles, is that the first preHminary steps towards 
'* the United States of Europe" shall be taken a few 
years after the conclusion of peace. As the result of 
discussion in different circles, the fundamental idea 
has probably been hammered into a great variety of 
forms. Where I myself joined in the discussion, it 
was agreed that the limitation to Europe was unde- 
sirable and impracticable, and the majority endorsed 
the proposal that at the fitting time there should be 
called a council representative of the great European 
Powers, together with the United States and Japan, 
not excluding the later admission of other States, 
with the hope that this council should be continually 
performing modest but useful functions, securing to 
itself the delegation of fuller and fuller powers, and 
thus become an effective organ of the common will 
of humanity, and exercise a powerful moral restraint 
over individual States. 

Among the functions which it was suggested such 
a council might exercise were — (i) Deahng with the 
difficult problems arising from the confusion of racial 



FUTURE MAINTENANCE OF PEACE iii 

and language boundaries in the south-eastern corner 
of Europe, and with those arising from the liquida- 
tion of the Turkish Empire ; (2) international postal 
arrangements ; (3) international labour legislation ; 
(4) the registration of international treaties when 
not secret, and such penalizing or moral condemna- 
tion of secret treaties as may be found practicable. 
It would seem to be suggested by analogy that as 
soon as such a council was formed and began to act, 
its powers would grow from year to year. 

3. The Whole Community and its Organization for 
War. — We have next to deal with the essence of the 
power of militarism. It lies in the circumstances 
symbolized by the fact that in every great national 
pageant, like the coronation or the funeral of a King, 
only the slightest recognition is granted to all the 
peaceful activities of the nation which fill up the 
lives and interests of the great bulk of the popula- 
tion, and the cortege consists almost exclusively of 
soldiers and diplomats. Kings, foreign Ministers, 
chiefs of the Army, chiefs of the Navy, diplomats — 
these form a circle in the closest touch with one 
another, in a certain measure of isolation, removed 
to a great extent from the influence of the best 
thought of the world, and determining for each 
nation whether it shall or shall not close in deadly 
struggle with its neighbour. Outside these circles 
but close by, ready to be admitted into partial con- 
sultation, are the great financial houses which are 
prepared to mortgage the accumulations of the past 
and the productions of the future for the purposes of 



112 PEACE AND WAR IN EUROPE 

present destruction, and the firms of armament- 
makers who sell the instruments of slaughter at a 
profit of ten to twenty per cent., and the newspapers 
by which the passions of the people can be played 
upon. 

Because the nations desire peace, will these govern- 
ing circles also desire peace ? 

If the diplomats and military chiefs do not desire 
peace, how can the nations which do restrain them ? 

Liberal and Labour politicians have been asking 
these questions for many years in all European 
countries. Answering the first question in the nega- 
tive, they have devised various policies in answer to 
the second. 

In Germany the Social Democratic party habitu- 
ally voted against the Budget, without any percep- 
tible result. In England, on similar lines, agitations 
have been carried on against increases in the Army 
and Navy estimates. Here, again, it is hard to see 
that anything has been gained. More and more, 
the current of democratic thought has been turned 
into the direction of popular control of the diplomats 
and of the foreign policy of the country. 

Here again, I believe, they will encounter a diffi- 
culty and a danger that requires to be faced. The 
difficulty arises from the fact that our constitutional 
organ for exercising popular control over Govern- 
ment is the House of Commons, and the House of 
Commons, by the working of the party system and 
by the morbid and dangerous development of party 
spirit in the country, has made itself practically in- 



FUTURE MAINTENANCE OF PEACE 113 

capable of putting any check on the Executive, and 
morally unfit for the task of lifting foreign relations 
into a higher and serener atmosphere. A necessary 
preliminary to giving the House of Commons more 
control over foreign policy should be a curbing of 
the excesses of party spirit and a weakening of the 
shackles of party discipline by the adoption of Pro- 
portional Representation. And then it would be 
necessary to wait to see the result of that. 

But behind this difficulty there lies an even more 
serious danger, in the lack of the necessary knowledge 
and intellectual training among people of all classes. 
This is partly due to the fact that popular education 
is mainly devoted to increasing efficiency for wage- 
earning, and that it is somewhat scanty and in- 
efficient at that ; and partly to the criminal obscur- 
antism of those estimable country clergy who refuse to 
allow the ancient Universities to abolish compulsory 
Greek, and thus divorce education from modern life 
for the public schools, and consequently for all those 
who have the opportunity of a prolonged education. 
Valuable as are the efforts of those who are building 
up systems of higher education among the people, 
these are only by degrees leavening the mass. It is 
only slowly that they are making possible the future 
democratic control of international politics. 

Meanwhile, a proposal has been made which seems 
to me, after turning it over and over, to offer a great 
hope ; it is that there shall be established, by volun- 
tary association, an International Court of Honour. 
It should exercise no military or financial force; it 

15 



114 PEACE AND WAR IN EUROPE 

should operate only through the power of public 
opinion. It should ascertain facts, and declare them. 
It would not have to wait till both nations at contro- 
versy with one another consented to refer the dispute 
to it. Directly one party, the weaker presumably, 
appealed to it, it could begin to examine the case as 
presented, and invite the antagonist also to put its 
case ; if it refused, the inference would be easy. The 
helplessness of the great mass of pacific public 
opinion, the opinion of those who pay the taxes, who 
suffer the toils and the wounds of campaigns, the 
widows and orphans left destitute, arises from their 
ignorance. If they had for their organ a judicial 
tribunal, of men of high honour and great capacity, 
selected for each international dispute from neutral 
nations, declaring where lay the justice of the issue, 
or how it might be compromised with honour to 
both sides, their confusion and uncertainty and help- 
lessness would disappear. They would find a common 
voice, and they would make it heard. I have 
searched, but have failed to find any sufficient reason 
for thinking this proposal impracticable, or the Court 
it contemplates likely to be corrupted or perverted. 

In conclusion, there is a question which citizens of 
the United Kingdom must needs put very seriously 
to themselves. We say we are at war against 
Prussian militarism : the Prussians answer that they 
are at war against British navalism. To our minds, 
*' Britannia rules the waves " generally carries no 
more meaning than that the British Fleet is the 
greatest and most powerful on the ocean, and that it 



FUTURE MAINTENANCE OF PEACE 115 

guards our shores and the oversea trade without 
which we should starve. To the German it means 
that the British Fleet arrogates to itself the right to 
make war upon all their shipping, and to seize the 
cargoes, irrespective of their nature ; and that it is 
only by permission, that can be revoked at any time, 
that German commerce can pass on water outside 
the narrow limits of the Baltic Sea. This is the 
question, technically, " of the right of capture of 
private goods at sea." The general opinion of the 
world is in favour of the abolition of that right, 
except for contraband of war. Britain asserts it, and 
therefore maintains it for all other navies as well as 
her own. By this right, as Mr. Gibson Bowles says, 
we have in the past been able *' to coerce not a 
nation only, but a whole continent." This it is that 
adds weight to the German argument in America 
and elsewhere, when they endeavour to rouse sus- 
picion and distrust against us. It is almost impos- 
sible for us to wish now, while this war lasts, that our 
Navy had any less freedom of action. But should we 
succeed, in Mr. Asquith's words, in wholly and 
finally destroying Prussian military domination, we 
must face the question, whether in foreign eyes our 
naval policy does not bear the appearance of a 
national arrogance similar to that of Prussia. That 
this right should be abandoned has been long advo- 
cated by Lord Loreburn, and for a good many years 
by Mr. F. E. Smith. Sir Edward Grey's policy at 
the last Hague Conference appears to have been to 
offer to take this momentous step if Germany would 



ii6 PEACE AND WAR IN EUROPE 

agree to a limitation of navies. But Germany re- 
jected this offer which, we can now see, would have 
been of enormous advantage to her. The question 
lies dormant during the war ; when the war is over it 
will inevitably be raised again, and in very powerful 
quarters. Then we shall have to decide whether we 
shall not offer up the right of capture as our sacrifice 
upon the altar of the world's peace. It will be a 
sacrifice — a sacrifice of power, founded on naval 
strength — but to make that sacrifice may be the 
highest wasdom. 

What are regarded here as the necessary means 
for securing the permanence of peace— the pursuit 
of justice in national, imperial and international 
affairs, a revision of University education, the abate- 
ment of Party rancour, the abandonment of a for- 
midable naval weapon — are no small matters. To 
some it may seem hopeless to make such demands 
from those who determine the policy of the nation. 

It would be hopeless, perhaps, if the nation is to 
be, at the conclusion of the war, much as it was 
before the war began. But two great changes are 
to be anticipated. After the war is quite over we 
shall begin to realize what modern war is — and not 
till then. That realization will be the spur driving 
us to the accomplishment of all that we understand 
to be necessary for the future maintenance of peace. 
And, secondly, the decision of national issues will be 
in the hands of women as well as men. For while 
the advance of women towards political power has 
in the past been slow in the extreme, it has been 



FUTURE MAINTENANCE OF PEACE 117 

irresistible, and steadily accelerating. The war itself 
has made all Europe realize that in the supreme 
struggle between nations, survival depends upon the 
energies of women being utilized as well as those of 
men ; and women who have left sheltered homes to 
face stern responsibilities and difficult duties will not 
easily return to a vapid existence. Henceforward 
they will count ; and they will count more and more, 
though it is not yet possible to see whether complete 
political equality between the sexes will ever be 
established. 

Now, while there has been in some quarters gross 
exaggeration with regard to the difference between 
men and women in their outlook on peace and war — 
and argument from natural differences in function is 
partially misleading for reasons shown in Lecture II. 
— yet beyond a doubt there is a difference, and the 
inevitable advance of Feminism is the world's best 
security against the destruction of civilization by 
international war. 



ADDENDUM 

THE NEED FOR AN INTERNATIONAL COURT 
OF HONOUR 

In such time for thought as men have to spare from 
the problem of carrying on the most deadly war the 
world has seen, they are gripped by the question, 
whether there is any possibility of preventing even 
greater and more terrible wars in the future, which 
would be waged with weapons enormously developed 
in death-dealing power, and all too probably utterly 
destroy the world's civilization, already so sorely 
damaged. This is surely the greatest question that 
ever confronted humanity. It is not a question to 
argue about, but one for individual and collective 
thinking ; for the most strenuous thought that each 
individual can compass, and the clearest exposition 
of whatever result is reached. 

There are some who hold that there is no possi- 
bility of such an avoidance of war. There are others 
who almost hope that the realization of what this 
war is will of itself induce nations to prevent wars 
and live together in peace, and, by degrees, in amity. 
Between these two extremes different thinkers hold 
all sorts of intermediate positions, but there is one 
conclusion which seems to me to be forcing itself 
into a very wide acceptance — the conclusion that as 
long as the different sovereign States into which the 
world is divided are under no control, and in no way 
subject, either materially or morally, to some Power 
representing humanity as a whole, peace can be at 
the best precarious. When the prospect seems 

ii8 



INTERNATIONAL COURT OF HONOUR 119 

fairest and the sky most untroubled, the volcanic 
forces beneath will ever be ready to burst forth with 
redoubled violence. 

If this be so, the problem of peace is the problem 
of creating this wider authority. It is no easy 
problem, for how can it be created, except by the 
combined will of the sovereign States themselves ? 
And when did any entirely independent and self- 
govering political units of their own free will create a 
superior authority and voluntarily submit themselves 
to it ? According to Hobbes and other theorists, 
States themselves were created by such a process ; 
free and independent individual men, being under no 
authority, and finding out by dire experience the 
perils and miseries of anarchy, created the State by 
selecting a Prince, and contracting to give him 
obedience for the sake of law and order. But no one 
supposes that such theories contain any positive 
historic truth. If history of the evolution of govern- 
ment over individuals can offer us any guidance for 
the problem of humanity to-day, it suggests that the 
new super-State authority cannot be suddenly estab- 
lished in its final form. In other words, it suggests 
that something may be created independently of the 
volition of sovereign States, which may be subse- 
quently accepted by them, and ultimately grow into 
a Power great enough to prevent wars, and to settle 
international issues on just principles. 

It is on these lines that the proposal for an Inter- 
national Court of Honour has been conceived. The 
idea is that it shall be created in the first place by a 
voluntary international association, with a constitu- 
tion framed to give as real and equal representation 
to all members as possible ; and that this association 
shall, when appealed to by either party in any inter- 
national difficulty, appoint as assessors the ablest 
and most impartial men whose services can be 



120 PEACE AND WAR IN EUROPE 

secured, and these assessors shall investigate the 
issue, inviting both parties to submit their case, and 
declaring what, in their opinion, the justice of the 
quarrel was. It would not, in the proper sense of 
the word, make an award like a Court of Arbitra- 
tion, and therefore no question would arise as to 
whether its award would be accepted. What it 
would do would be to enlighten public opinion through- 
out the world. Yet the mere fact that nations find it 
worth while now to appeal to general public opinion 
shows that the International Court of Honour would 
exercise a very real force. That force would grow 
just in proportion to the weight, enlightenment, and 
justice of its pronouncements; and, therefore, since 
all human organizations have in themselves a force 
working for their own existence and growth, the 
Association for maintaining the International Court 
of Honour would strive continually to uphold its pres- 
tige by appointing for each inquiry the most authori- 
tative Court it could discover and induce to serve. 

The Court of Honour would not be confined to 
questions at issue between Governments. One of 
its most important functions would be to exercise a 
control over the diffusion of false and misleading 
statements in the world's Press if of a character to 
aggravate international relations. To take a par- 
ticular example : In the period immediately preceding 
the South African War, public opinion in Great 
Britain was inflamed by statements, circulated very 
widely and with the greatest prominence, that two 
Englishmen had been unwarrantably put to death 
by the Transvaal Government. Actually, they had 
not even received any physical injury. It would be 
the function of the International Court of Honour 
in such circumstances, on complaint from any 
Government maligned in the Press of a foreign 
country, to invite the newspaper concerned to justify 



INTERNATIONAL COURT OF HONOUR 121 

its statement, and if it failed or refused to make 
the attempt, to publish the fact to the world. 
Similarly, private individuals, associations, and cor- 
porations would have the right of appealing to the 
Court of Honour against stigmas laid upon them by 
State officials if the case had an international char- 
acter, and was outside the cognizance of all other 
Courts. Of the various developments of the Court, 
of its possible extension into internal affairs where 
what is most important is to ascertain and pubHsh 
facts, as frequently is the case in labour disputes, it 
is not necessary to speculate here. 

The International Court of Honour, while resting 
on the power of public opinion, would enormously 
increase that power. Public opinion is, under 
present conditions, rendered relatively powerless by 
the lack of independent access to the facts ; it is 
confused and puzzled ; whatever information comes 
before it is reasonably suspected of being evoked for 
some particular end, but what that end may be few 
people are in a position to guess. From such 
shackles it would be freed, to a great extent, by the 
Court. 

Many doubts will arise with regard to this pro- 
posal. First, it will be asked whether there is power 
in the world for its creation. The answer is that the 
supreme interest of most people is international 
peace, and among this great majority there are 
thousands of men of great wealth and influence. If 
they believe that the International Court of Honour 
will have the influence which is hoped for it, it will 
be common sense on their part to see that it is created. 

Secondly, it will be asked whether the Govern- 
ments of States will allow such a power to be formed 
independently of them, and to grow to such influence 
as to exercise any real control over their actions 
without being itself controlled by them. Frankly, I 

16 



122 PEACE AND WAR IN EUROPE 

do not believe that they will. But once a sufficiently 
powerful international association has been built up 
and has begun its work, the one effective move that 
they will be able to make against it will he to compete 
with it. They will naturally be moved to create an 
International Court on the principle of representa- 
tion from sovereign States, and once this is estab- 
lished, there will be in existence the germ of a federal 
authority for the world as a whole. 

Minor federal authorities, as those of the Swiss 
and American Federations, have grown up under the 
pressure of a common danger. The common danger 
exists, and grows ever more threatening and terrible, 
to impel the world, once the germ of the world- 
federal authority is there, to foster its growth and in- 
fluence. And, just as in each nation the affairs of the 
Central Government draw from all over the country 
the most energetic minds from the service of localities 
and private businesses, so the World's Federal Court 
would draw to itself the ablest men from national 
Governments. 

These, then, are the questions for which I crave 
consideration : 

1. Can the world's peace be permanently secured 
except by the evolution of a super-national authority? 

2. Can States be brought to acquiesce in the 
existence of such an authority, and to concede it 
sufficient power for effectiveness, unless the germ of 
it is created and fostered up to a certain point, inde- 
pendently of their volition ? 

3. Can any better way of creating the germ of the 
Confederation of the World be suggested than the 
International Court of Honour for the purpose of 
ascertaining truth, and investigating the application 
of the principle of justice, in issues between nations? 



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